【正确答案】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.
(1)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.
(2)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.
On the other hand, we should be aware that while language is arbitrary by nature, it is not entirely arbitrary. The link between a linguistic sign and its meaning has to do with convention. It means that in any language there are certain sequences of sounds that have a conventionally accepted meaning. Those words are customarily used by all speakers with the same intended meaning and understood by all listeners in the same way. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative and conventionality of communication via language possible. There are two different schools of belief concerning arbitrariness. Most people, especially structural linguists believe that language is arbitrary by nature. Other people, however, hold that language is iconic, that is, there is a direct relation or correspondence between sound and meaning, such as onomatopoeia (e.g.: cuckoo; crash). For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it. And for them, the sets of signals used in communication are finite.

【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的制约。同时，考生还应理解语言的其他几个本质特征：双重性、创造性、移位性等，并能够举例分析。