Which linguistic concept is best illustrated by a line showing smooth gradations between hot and cold?

• A. Range of meaning between hot and cold
• B. The concept of antonymy
• C. Syntactic hierarchy
• D. Phoneme inventory

Answer: (A)

Language often expresses meaning on a continuum, not just as binary opposites. A line showing smooth gradations between hot and cold demonstrates that temperature terms live on a semantic scale, with degrees like warm, lukewarm, cool, and very hot existing along that spectrum. This gradient in meaning is what the concept is capturing—the range of meaning between hot and cold.

So, the idea described here is a range of meaning on a gradient, which is why that option is the best fit. The other choices point to different areas: antonymy deals with opposite pairs but can be binary rather than gradational; syntactic hierarchy concerns sentence structure; phoneme inventory concerns sounds.