Sentence:  He has announced results on Hokan , Penutian , Uto-Aztecan , and almost all other American families and phyla , and has diagrammed their <WSD>degree</WSD> of interrelation ; but he has not worked out by lexicostatistics one comprehensively complete classification of even a single family other than Salish . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  a specific identifiable position in a continuum or series or especially in a process