[简答题]Do you think there is an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning Illustrate your view with examples.

参考答案: Yes, I believe there is an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.
Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. According to Saussure, the arbitrariness nature of language refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. For instance, we cannot explain why a book is called a book, read as/buk/, or a pen a/pen/or 笔 in Chinese instead of something else. However, there seems to be different levels of ARBITRARINESS.
(A)Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning. You may object this when you think of words with different degrees of onomatopoeia namely, words that sounds like the sounds they describe. For example, in Chinese we use 叮咚，轰隆，叽里咕噜 to describe some sounds. These linguistic forms seem to have a natural basis. But in English, totally different words are used to describe these sounds. For example, a dog barks wow wow in English while 汪汪 in Chinese. As a matter of fact, arbitrariness and onomatopoeia effects may work at the same time.
(B)At the same time, the arbitrariness of language is not absolute. According to systemic- functionalists and American functionalists, the most strictly arbitrary level of language exists in the distinctive units of sounds by which we distinguish pairs of words like pin and bin, or fish and dish. Therefore language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level. Otherwise, it would be impossible for people to understand and communicate.
(C)The link between a linguistic sign and its meaning has to do with convention. One thing we should note is the fact that although the link between form and meaning is arbitrary, there exists certain relationship between them. It is precisely because linguistic forms do not resemble what they signify that they can be sued to encode what is significant by convention in different communities. So the fact that there is no natural connection between the form of words and their meaning makes it possible for different communities to use language to organize and categorize their experience of the world.
答案解析: [解析] 此题考查的是考生对语言的本质特征之一——任意性的理解。语言符号与意义之间的关系本质上是具有任意性的。然而语言任意性体现在不同的层面，符号与意义之间还受语言规约性