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[[Yuen Ren Chao]] has described sentence-final particles as "phrase suffixes": just as a word suffix is in construction with the word preceding it, a sentence-final particle or phrase suffix is "in construction with a preceding phrase or sentence, though phonetically closely attached to the syllable immediately preceding it".<ref name="Chao">{{cite book | last=Chao |first=Yuen Ren |title=A Grammar of Spoken Chinese |year=1968 |publisher=University of California Press |___location=Berkeley |isbn=0-520-00219-9 | page=149}}</ref> According to Chao, the sentence-final particle is phonetically close to the last word before it, but syntactically it is equidistant from every word in the whole [[Predicate (grammar)|predicate]].
While sentence-final particles usually do not carry meaning themselves or [[Denotation (semiotics)|denote]] anything explicit, they may be derived from words that do carry meaning when they occur in other contexts and serve different functions.<ref name="Li & Thompson 1">{{cite book | last=Li | first=Charles; and Sandra Thompson | title=Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar | year=1981 | publisher=University of California Press | ___location=Los Angeles | isbn=978-
A major use of sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese specifically is thought to be as a signal of the speaker's attitude, the intended [[Illocutionary act|force]] of the statement to which the particle is attached, and "how the utterance is to be taken by the hearer."<ref name="Lin1"/> For example, the addition of a particle may soften the tone of a question that might sound presumptuous or inappropriate without the particle. As such, sentence-final particles in this sense often perform an interpersonal function, rather than a grammatical one. Nevertheless, there are cases in which sentence-final particles do perform grammatical functions, such as Mandarin ''ma'' 嗎/吗, the "question particle," which changes the grammatical mood of a sentence to [[Interrogative mood|interrogative]]. Likewise, even though sentence-final particles can usually be omitted from a sentence without making the sentence ungrammatical or changing its meaning,<ref name="Lin1"/> some particles do contain information critical to the interpretation of an utterance's meaning, such as Mandarin ''le'' 了.<ref name="Li & Thompson 1"/>
==Examples==
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===Mandarin===
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