答友人——关于语法分析的几个原则问题

10年前发表《现代汉语词尾“了”的语法意义》(《中国语文》1988年第5期)一文时没有想到，这篇文章能在海内外引起这么广泛的兴趣，以至10年来不断有人发文章补充、商榷、以及评判得失。可惜自己近年来已经完全转入汉语史与方言学的研究，不能就此问题与同好做进一步的探讨，心下甚为惭愧。这里仅就读书所及产生的一些想法、看法以及当年写作时已经想到的一些问题，简略地写在下面，以回答诸位友好的提问。

This article is a reply to some questions from readers of the author's paper 'The grammatical meaning of the suffix Le in contemporary Chinese' (1988). The author maintains that there should be two Le in Chinese and the meaning of Le is better to refer as 'realization'. He insists that in grammatical analysis, one should make distinctions between the original meaning and what is extended by the researcher, between the meaning of the word and that of a phrase with the word as a component and between research and teaching. He also points out that in the study of any language phenomenon, examples should be grammatical and our aim is to discover rules rather than just to give it a label.