What is the immediate cause of liftoff? If I understand correctly, when a plane transitions from takeoff roll to being airborne, it is not something that happens "by itself" when the airspeed is high enough, but is caused by deliberate pilot input somehow.

Which control surfaces are involved in causing the plane to lift off?


Is it an ordinary nose-up movement of the elevators? That is, the elevators create negative lift that pushes the tailplane down, which makes the entire aircraft pivot around the main gear and increases the wings' AoA enough to create lift that takes the plane off the ground.
Or is it something that increases lift with unchanged attitude, such as a symmetric aileron movement, or an additional flaps extension? And then after the plane is airborne it is rotated to climbing attitude?


The descriptions I can easily Google up point towards 1. However, while that makes perfect sense for tricycle gear I don't see how that would work with taildraggers. Pushing down on the tail would just increase the downward force on the tail wheel rather than change the AoA.
As the elevators rotate to get a negative pitch angle to the horizontal (moving the tip of the elevator upwards), a pressure difference is created causing it to produce a downwards force, and as a result the aircraft pivots around the landing gear, rotating upwards.
As it does so, the wing starts to generate more lift, as can be
seen on the graph below. The higher the angle of attack- the more
lift, since the lift coefficient becomes higher, up to where stall starts.
When the lift exceeds the weight, the aircraft will lift off.




For taildraggers, the tail is normally rotated up at a low speed while the aircraft continues to accelerate, and once a sufficient speed is reached, the tail surface is again lowered, causing the wing to increase the AoA and to lift. Footnote: If I'm not mistaken, this is more of an act to improve control and reduce drag, since at some point the aircraft will lift off on it's own with it's tail-down angle of attack.