Effects of proficiency and gender on learners’ use of the pragmatic marker 吧ba

The Chinese particle吧ba has not received much attention in pragmatic studies, particularly in learners’ uses. However, L2 pragmatic investigation will contribute to the literature of 吧ba and, more generally, Chinese linguistic studies on particles. Therefore, this study investigates the pragmatic marker 吧ba employed by L2 learners of Chinese using data collected from a Chinese learner corpus. The effects of proficiency level and gender were both explored. The findings indicated that proficiency affected learners’ uses differently across the four illocutionary types of 吧ba. Learners across the three proficiency levels in the corpus showed more similarities concerning the directive and interrogative usages of the marker but more differences regarding the assertive and topic-introducing usages. Male learners were found to employ 吧ba more frequently than female learners across the illocutionary types of assertive, directive, and interrogative. The L2 pragmatic study of 吧ba adds to previous Chinese linguistic research on this particle and contributes to theoretical debates over Chinese pragmatic markers. Implications for corpus pragmatic studies are also discussed.