Mandarin utterance-final particle ba (?) in the conversational scoreboard

Abstract

We explore the meaning of the Mandarin particle ba (?) in interaction with the utterance to which it attaches (the “anchor”) and the context. Previous literature on ba contains no unified generalization – effects claimed by various scholars include uncertainty, soliciting agreement/confirmation, or politeness. To arrive at a unified descriptive generalization and clarify the distribution of the particle, we conducted a corpus study of ba using Mandarin-language television and film (95 tokens).