Arbitrariness and Motivation of Linguistic Sign

Since the proposition of arbitrariness of linguistic sign by Saussure,the argument on it has not been stopping.With the development of cognitive linguistics,some linguists,from the perspective of iconicity and motivation of language sign,have thrown doubts on Saussure’s arbitrariness.This paper,after trying to give a survey on the relationship between arbitrariness and iconicity,suggests arbitrary and iconicity should both exist on different levels of language and iconicity serves as an integrated part to arbitrariness and arbitrariness is restrained by iconicity.