The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 87. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 830 RICARDO MALDONADO Table . Cooreman s four basic pragmatic voices Active direct Ag Pat Inverse Pat Ag Passive Pat Ag Antipassive Ag Pat Functional and typological approaches to voice phenomena have provided the basis for defining these profiling strategies Keenan 1976 1985 Dixon 1980 Givon 1990 Klaiman 1991 Cooreman 1994 Zavala 1997 Givon and Yang 1998 . This chapter has grown from those analyses with a view to providing a Cognitive Grammar approach Langacker 1987a 1990 1991 2000 and many other publications that motivates the emergence of a variety of voice marking systems as corresponding to alternative conceptualization strategies. While middle voice refers to actions or states remaining in the subject s dominion the other four voice marking strategies refer to alternative prominence adjustments between Agent Ag and Patient Theme pat Th . Cooreman 1987 has provided this four-way voice contrast in terms of topicality a. Active direct-. Both Agent and Patient are topical yet the Agent is more topical than the Patient b. Inverse Both Agent and Patient are topical yet the Patient is more topical than the Agent c. Passive The Patient is topical and the Agent is completely nontopical and d. Antipassive The Agent is topical and the Patient is completely nontopical. Cooreman s proposal is schematically represented in table . I consider Cooreman s four-way distinction to be a solid basis for further evaluation of the cognitive import of each voice type with respect to the basic patterns of event construction in the languages of the world. In line with Langacker 1990 1991 and Schulze 2000 I will assume that languages are not ergative or absolutive per se so that one should not speak about accusative versus ergative languages but instead have dominant accusative or ergative strategies to construe events. Thus so-called ergative languages largely employ ergative patterns scenarios in Schulze s terms in most situations yet they may employ accusative patterns to .
