Italian learners’ use of Chinese sentence-final particles: marking interrogatives in a tandem-learning context

Due to their light-weight appearance and polysemy, the acquisition of Chinese sentence-final particles (SFPs) constitutes a criticality for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). However, the number of studies addressing SFP acquisition and teaching is still limited. This study investigates the use of SFPs in the interactions between 13 Italian CFL learners and 6 native speakers of Chinese participating in a face-to-face tandem-learning project over a three-month timespan. In particular, it focuses on learners’ production of SFPs marking questions (yes/no or truncated) and analyses the factors that foster or hinder SFP use. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the transcribed conversations showed that (i) the most frequently produced SFP was ma 吗, whereas other interrogative SFPs were seldom or never used; (ii) the production of SFPs did not vary over time, instead it seemed to be tied to factors such as the presence of (semi-)fixed chunks or the type of task (focused or unfocused) in which the participants were engaged.