The research in
field of Natural Language Processing usually assumes existence of a syntactic "Generative Engine" that combines words and word-like elements into syntactic structures, and then sometimes displaces them by "syntactic movement". A Linguistic Parser must "undo" all effects of syntactic movement, which results in a structure where relations between words are represented more directly.
In recent years, a new theoretical framework was introduced, in which syntactic combinatorial system does not stop at level of words. Instead, same "Generative Engine" continues all-the-way-down into morphology. The various parts of same word correspond to different areas of syntactic tree, and then are brought together by multiple applications of movement.
Within this Constructionalist Framework, syntactic is not a tree of words - it is a tree made of sub-lexical elements like roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. The components of a single verb are spread all over parse tree.
Correspondingly, function of a Linguistic Parser is different. The goal of parsing is to "reconstruct" every such sub-lexical element into its original place in syntactic tree.
By undoing effects of syntactic movement, "Constructionalist Parsing" produces syntactic trees where atomic constituents of every word are distributed through such a "reconstructed" syntactic tree. Every constituent is restored into its appropriate location in tree, where context for its semantic contribution is found in immediately adjacent locations.
