Yes, for some languages with a less rigid word order system. More importantly, writers ,driven by their pragmatic and discoursal intentions,tend to express certain backgrounded pieces of information like as a parenthetical phrase in their copmlex grammatical constructions. Some EFL student readers and translators find such constructions with embedded infinitive phrases difficult to analyze.

Word order is significantly different across languages. It plays an important role in determining meanings expressed in other languages by inflections. A few languages have comparatively restricted or fixed word orders, frequently depending on the manner in which constituent parts are arranged to communicate grammar based knowledge. Languages which communicate grammar based knowledge by means of inflection provide space for being flexible and this is helpful for encoding processed data for instance topicalisation and focus. Languages can differ with regard to their dependence on the order of words to indicate the equation among the elements that make up the clause. Infinitival clauses can be a good source for languages that have a free word order and allow more flexibility in the movement and distribution of its components, i.e. Arabic language as an inflectional language.

Word order is most often similar in all languages but the ways these words are connected differently with changes in word-forms, word-classes, and other aspects of rules of grammar. For example,

 （1）He came yesterday.   他来于昨日。

 （2）Yesterday he came. 昨天他来过。

The similiarity lies in the information structure, the difference likes in the syntactic structure.

I would differentiate between grammar and semantics. From one side, I doubt that Infinitival Clauses or word order as syntactic elements play an important role in variation and change since grammatical rules are very specific for every concrete language.

From the other side, I would study their semantic meaning to get rid of language-dependence. For instance, in the emotion domain repetition of words must be studied to localize "hot spots". Below is an abstract from my PhD thesis (p.21):

[Leech & Svartvik, 2003] describe grammatical means to express emotions (the code of a mean referred to hereafter is designated in brackets): interjections (299), e.g. Oh, what a beautiful present!; exclamations (300a), e.g. What a wonderful time we’ve had!; emphatic so and such (300b), e.g. I’m so afraid they’ll get lost!; repetitions (300c), e.g. This house is ‘far, ‘far too expensive!; intensifying adverbs and modifiers (301), e.g. We are utterly powerless!; emphasis (302), e.g. How ever did they escape?; intensifications of negative sentences (303a), e.g. She didn’t speak to us at all; negative noun phrases beginning with not a (303b), e.g. We arrived not a moment too soon; fronted negations (303c), e.g. Never have I seen such a crowd of people!; exclamatory and rhetorical questions (304, 305), e.g. Hasn’t she grown! and What difference does it make?. Note that this thesis uses findings by [Leech & Svartvik, 2003] for appraising emotions.

Similarly, Infinitival Clauses or word order markers could be used as identification anchors to localize variation and change since they identify conspicuous points through the syntactic structure. I would assume there are also more grammatical elements in a language to be investigated comprehensively. Not only Infinitival Clauses that do not "distract" by some stylistic variation.

Thesis Opinion Mining and Lexical Affect Sensing

Olga, a very nice question. I included the thesis in my post, but you probably didn't see it https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278383087_Opinion_Mining_and_Lexical_Affect_Sensing

Thesis Opinion Mining and Lexical Affect Sensing