Abstract 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.

中文翻译：

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意大利语学习者普通话句末助词的习得

摘要 本文涉及意大利语母语者对四个普通话句末助词 ma, a, ba, ne 的习得。该研究为从习得和教学的角度研究句末助词做出了贡献，这在语言学文献中鲜有研究。本文提出了对两组意大利语学习者进行定量和定性实验分析，一组处于初级水平，一组处于中级水平。研究表明，ne 和 ba 是意大利学习者获得的最具挑战性的粒子。我们认为这是因为 ne 和 ba 是高度多功能的，它们并不能简单地确定子句的类型。本文测试的ne和ba的功能，其实更好的定义为语篇助词，其含义高度依赖于上下文。此外，实验表明，正如预期的那样，熟练程度不仅与句子最终粒子的掌握直接相关，而且教学工具也起着至关重要的作用。事实上，这项研究的结果为意大利学习者教授普通话句末助词提供了许多教学意义。