The particle bara in Marathi optionally occurs in final position in declaratives, imperatives, and wh-interrogatives giving rise to different discourse effects. This paper presents
the first description of utterance-final bara in declaratives and imperatives, offering a unified
analysis for its distributional profile and interpretive effects. I will claim that in these uses, bara
has an advisory effect: a bara-using speaker conventionally expresses their preference that the
addressee undertake a dependent doxastic or preferential commitment to the content introduced
by the speaker. A second conventional component is a felicity condition that undertaking this
commitment is a pre-condition for fulfilling a contextually salient addressee-benefiting goal.
The existence of this conventionalized cross-clausal discourse strategy reinforces a view on
which models of discourse update must not only track (i) evolving interlocutor beliefs and preferences; but also (ii) speaker attitudes regarding how commitments should be optimally taken
on by their interlocutors; and (iii) how acts of taking on commitments relate to the broader
action choices and goals of interlocutors.