As a (woodwind) player I often find myself annotating a score with “slur” markings to denote a phrase / motif especially those that counter the meter across bar lines.
As a writer of pieces mainly for a jazz quartet, I like to communicate some sets of notes as being a phrase - several notes; one idea - and within that phrase there may be a variety of articulations.
In this case the phrase markings denote the phrase and quite separately, other markings denote the playing technique.