Actor-sensitivity and Obligatory Control in Kavalan and Some Other Formosan Languages

It is shown in this paper that in Kavalan and some Formosan languages, verbs in object-control complements are required to undergo causativization. We argue that the peculiar requirement may be due to a well-observed constraint, i.e., the Actor-sensitivity constraint, which in turn follows from the morphological properties of voice affixes attested in these languages. It follows that control dependency should be thematically determined rather than grammatically determined, a conclusion against the standard structural approach.