It has long been observed that common nouns and noncommon nouns (including proper nouns and pronouns) take different case markers in a number of Formosan languages: common nouns take u/a-system of case markers while noncommon nouns take i-system case markers (Mei 1994, Li 1995, Huang 1995, among many others). In Kavalan, the common-noncommon distinction is also attested but in a different fashion: it is attested in noun classification rather than in case marking. The system of noun classification in Kavalan is summarized below: noun ╱╲ common noncommon ╱╲ ╱╲ human nonhuman human nonhuman kin�� u�� ti φ��/ni (��when numerals or quantifiers are present) (�告ndicates zero morpheme) In Kavalan, nouns are classified into two major categories: common nouns and noncommon nouns. In the category of common nouns, human members occur with the noun-class marker kin while nonhumnan members occur with u upon the presence of numerals or quantifiers. On the other hand, in the category of common nouns, human members take ti while nonhuman nouns either take φ (zero morpheme) or ni. It is noteworthy that like classifiers, noun-class markers in Kavalan classify nouns according to the inherent properties of the entities to which the nouns refer, though they are slightly different from classifiers in their syntactic behavior (e.g. unlike typical classifiers, the noun-class markers for noncommon nouns do not occur with numerals or quantifiers). Besides, the results of this study also shed light on the systems of the noun-marking in Formosan languages. In light of the noun-class marking system in Kavalan, we postulate that the common-noncommon distinction which is previously claimed to be made in case-making in other Formosan languages should be a distinction of noun-class marking instead. In that case, case-markers are morphological complexes: they consist of a case-marker and a noun-class marker. Under the analysis, case-markers for noncommon human nouns should comprise of a case-marker plus a noun-class marker Ci (C stands for a consonant). On this view, a number of long standing problems (e.g. the problem why nouns in non-argument positions should take "case markers") can be solved.