The research is aimed at the elaboration of a multi-dimensional description of sentence structure that is consonant with Ronald Langacker's work in cognitive linguistics as well as key aspects of Halliday's Functional Grammar. Particular attention is paid to the description of language in terms of learned pairings of meaning and form (constructions), in a way that foregrounds the speaker's and the listener's perspective (intersubjectivity, construal). Additionally, basic insights from dependency grammar are integrated into cognitive linguistic research.

The research contributes to the theoretical elaboration of a possible version of dependency grammar, inspired by cognitive linguistics. Additionally, it explores the history of dependency grammar with particular regard to Sámuel Brassai's innovations in the development a verb-centric, dependency-oriented description of sentence structure.

The research explores form-meaning correspondences in the Hungarian clause, and offers a multi-dimensional analysis informed by the theoretical assumptions of cognitive linguistics (usage-based construction grammar) and dependency grammar. Similarly to what we find in Halliday's Functional Grammar, the analysis separates the clause as the representation of a process, as a speech act and as a message embedded in context. A key concern is to describe such word order patterns as Hungarian preverb-verb inversion (treated as the formal marker of overriding relations) and the binary division of the clause as a reflection of information structure (which is analysed in terms of contextualizing relations in the proposed model).