In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, a cline is a scale of continuous gradation. While cline is most frequently invoked as a general concept, it has also developed specialized uses in various linguistic sub-disciplines.

Cline of grammaticalisation

Within the study of grammaticalisation

Grammaticalisation

In linguistics, grammaticalization is a process by which words representing objects and actions transform through sound change and language migration to become grammatical objects...

, the process of linguistic change in which a content word changes to a function word

Function word

Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...

 or a grammatical affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

 is depicted as a cline of grammaticalisation.

Cline of instantiation

In his early work, the linguist Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential model of language, the systemic functional linguistic model. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar .-Biography:Halliday was born and raised in England...

 theorized about the cline of instantiation and noted its centrality to corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...

.

General usage

Less formally, cline has been applied to describe a wide variety of linguistic gradients:

• cline of activity and transitivity
  Transitivity (grammatical category)
  In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take...
  
  
• cline of attribution
  Attribution (psychology)
  Attribution is a concept in social psychology referring to how individuals explain causes of behavior and events. Attribution theory is an umbrella term for various theories that attempt to explain these processes. Fritz Heider first proposed a theory of attribution The Psychology of Interpersonal...
  
  
• cline of intelligibility
  Mutual intelligibility
  In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...
  
  
• cline of narrative interference
• cline of metaphor
  Conceptual metaphor
  In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality . A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience...
  
  
• cline from metonymy
  Metonymy
  Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...
  
  
• semantic cline