See Iconicity Xing Li, According To The Basic Sentence From The British And French Han

Language is a very large and complex system, involving all aspects of human life. Human beings have had a strong interest in languge since ancient times. As the human cognitive ability improves, many valuable theories have been put forward. At the same time, there are a lot of arguments, among which the argument between arbitrariness and motivation of language has begun from 6th century BC. At the beginning of 20th century, Saussure, father of modern linguistics, believed that arbitrariness was the first design feature of human language, which had been popular in the filed of linguistics for several decades. As the cognitive linguistics grew, the motivation of language came to be generally accepted. Nowadays, it is widely believed that language has these two features: arbitrariness and motivation. Human beings are a rational animal. Motivation is the basic feature of language, while arbitrariness is the way in which people can use language easily. Firstly, this paper gives a comment on the arbitrariness that is proposed by Saussure, puts forward that arbitrariness is the way in which people can use language easily, and emphasizes that in order to become the bridge of human communication, language must experience three options:option of individual, option of community and option of language. So we can see that the forming of language is to a great degree limited, while the basic feature of language, motivation, can be further proved. Then the paper further emphasizes that iconicity is one kind of motivation of language. Finally, the paper will discuss iconicity from the aspect of four basic structures of sentence of English, French and Chinese. Meanwhile, through the'model of ball', it will demonstrate the main cause of forming of four basic structures of sentence', and futher confirm that motivation is the basic feature of language.