The paper presents an analysis of Malgasy deverbal nouns. I argue that the prefix f- that appears on deverbal nouns is not a nominalizer, as is commonly assumed, but is rather part of the verbal complex, a functional head that cross-linguistically selects for little v. A candidate for the category of the head is Flav(or), a functional category proposed by Key (2010) to encode the semantic 'flavor' of little v in Turkish. As a causative, it is Flav that introduces an external argument in its specifier. Considering independent evidence that Flav is a phase head, and FlavP a phase, the distribution of f- can be accounted for by appealing to the generalized doubly-filled COMP filter of Koopman and Szabolsci (2000) and Sportiche (1992). The analysis proposed here then utilizes an analysis of Turkish causatives to explain the distribution of Malagasy f-, which has previously been considered to be a language-specific trait of Malagasy verbs.