Hopper and Thompson's (1980) seminal article on transitivity has brought forth renewed interest in the passive and other correlates of transitivity. Langacker (1982) and others working within the Cognitive Grammar framework argue that the passive voice is an independent construction and that it is not a reorganization of the active voice. This paper builds on this view of the passive and presents an analysis of the processual passive in Old Saxon, using the theory of Cognitive Grammar. This semantic analysis focuses on the retention of the dative case in the passive and the similarity in event structure in events encoded by the active or passive voice.