Applied linguists study language use in context associated with specialized registers ESP (e.g., business or academic). Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) starts at social context ie stratification whether context, systemic semantics called pragmatics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology-Graphology. Formally a system of networks is used. For example academic writing prefers
nominalization (nominalization vs verbalization) because of
information density. See additionally:
Systemic Linguistics Information