The acquisition of Mandarin sentence final particles by Italian learners

This article deals with the acquisition of four Mandarin sentence final particles ma, a, ba, ne by Italian native speakers. The research gives a contribution to the study of sentence final particles from an acquisition and didactic perspective, which has been scarcely investigated in the linguistic literature. The article proposes a quantitative and qualitative experimental analysis with two groups of Italian learners, one at elementary proficiency level and one at intermediate level. The research shows that ne and ba are the most challenging particles to acquire by Italian learners. We argue that this due to the fact that ne and ba are highly polyfunctional and they do not simply determine the type of clause. The functions of ne and ba tested in this paper, in fact, are better defined as discourse particles, whose meaning is highly dependent from the context. Moreover, the experiment demonstrates not only that the proficiency level is straightforward correlated to the mastery of sentence final particles, as expected, but also that the didactic tools play a crucial role. As a matter of fact, the results of this study opens up a number of pedagogical implications in relation to the teaching of Mandarin sentence final particles to Italian learners.