Cline

"2000 Michael J. O'Brien and R. Lee Lyman: Applying Evolutionary Archaeology →ISBN [A cline is a] character gradient, wherein a character such as length increases or decreases gradually and continuously. A cline distributed over geographic space is a "chorocline"; a cline distributed over time is a "chronocline." Compare with chorospecies and chronospecies. . . Simpson termed the change through time a "chronocline", where a cline represents a character gradient. A chunk of a chronocline comprises a chronospecies. The difficulty with identifying a chronospecies resides, then, in first identifying a chronocline, or temporal gradient in a character or attribute. As pointed out by Kevin Padian, some characters "change more or less uniformly through time, but others change not at all, and still others vacillate with no clear trend. This is ... one reason to be suspicious of the evolutionary utility of clines: no criterion for identifying a cline seems to be in force. A cline is simply a gradient in character state along a continuum, and it may be broken, temporarily reversed, or stepped. Furthermore, there is no criterion for a cline's magnitude and no control on its probability.""

"Let C₁ and C₂ be two nonintersecting clines. Prove that there is a unique pair of points that are simultaneously symmetric to both C₁ and C₂."

"2004 Language typology: a functional perspective →ISBN The cline of instantiation is a dimension that organizes systems of all kinds — physical systems like that of meteorology, biological systems, social systems and semiotic systems. In the realm of semiotic systems, text lies at the instance end of the cline. Text is "semiotic weather"; but what about the "semiotic climate", weather patterns and subclimates? There are in fact clear semiotic analogies. The "semiotic climate" is the overall linguistic system; it is the meaning potential of a language. Thus a text instantiates the linguistic system; and the linguistic system "potentializes" innumerable texts."