Abstract
We explore the meaning of the Mandarin particle ba (吧). On our proposal, the
effects of the particle emerge in interaction with the utterance to which it attaches (what we term the anchor)
and the discourse context, with consequences for the semantics-pragmatics interface. We focus on the
utterance-final occurrences of ba, which constitute the majority of the particle's uses. Ba can also occur in the
middle of an utterance, with an effect described as attention-checking, but we leave such use to future work.