Case Analysis of Semantic Transformation under Language Contact—From "Wuri Idol "to"Amazing My X!"

: There is a common language phenomenon in Korean that arouses empathy by subjectivisation personal pronouns. In popular culture, "wuri + idol name" is widely used to express praise, admiration or pride for the idol. With the introduction of Korean film and television and popular culture into China, the transliteration variant of "wuri + idol name", "wuli/in the house + idol name", also appeared in Chinese. Combining with the subjective usage of personal pronouns already existing in Chinese, gradually developed the "my X" structure, which is more consistent with Chinese expression habits and has a wider scope of application, and combined with commendatory words and inverted sentences, strengthened praise and pride, and formed the "my X" sentence pattern, It has become a network buzzword in recent years. The reasons for the formation of this catchphrase come from both the internal and external stimulation of language contact.


Introduction
In recent years, "Amazing my X!" has become a buzzword on the Internet, and has been on the hot search headlines of various media for many times.The number of news involving "Amazing my X!" in Xinhuanet alone has reached millions.CCTV Finance and Economics Channel has also launched a series of documentaries entitled "Amazing my Country".This language structure has also attracted the attention of relevant language researchers.There are research results in the form of papers, but their research focuses on the pragmatic analysis of inverted sentences or the modal word "le".[5][6][7] However, we think that the personal pronoun "mine" is the most worthy of study in this result.This is the empathy effect caused by the subjectification of personal pronouns.It can not only be examined from the characteristics of Chinese itself, but also be combined with the expression of "wuri + idol name" in Korean to explore the causes of its language contact [8][9][10].
Our teacher is not tall.
Our school is small.(4) Wuri naraneun areumdabda.Our country is very beautiful.

Wuri (Our)--Nae (My)
In spoken Korean, in order to shorten the distance with the listener, the speaker often uses "wuri (us) + name/title" to express "nae (my) + name/title", putting the listener and himself in the With the same standpoint, people who are originally only related to themselves become related to the listener, in exchange for empathy, and make the conversation go more smoothly.For example: (1) (eommaga seossaengnimege:) Wuri Seonyeongi gongbu eoddaeyo?(the mother to the teacher:) How is my daughter Seonyeong studying?
(The child showed off his father to his friends.)My father has a big company.
(the grandpa to his friend:) Your grandson is very smart.

Wuri (Our) + Idol
It is used exclusively for fans to call their favorite young idols.It is a nickname that brings closer the relationship with the idols.It cannot be called face-to-face.It is used for the activities of releasing idols or shouting to idols from a distance to express praise, admiration or pride.The two are actually not the same.The two have no possesive relationship.For example [11][12][13]: (1) Wuri Hyegyonim yeongiga jeongmal johasseoyo.Hyegyo acted so well.

Empathy Effect
The above four usages of "wuri (our)" in Korean, the first one is the original usage, and the other three are gradually developed usages.They show the trend of virtualization or de-possession of "our" and they are the manifestation of the subjectifiying of personal pronouns, also as a sympathetic effect.The psychological reason for this subjectivisation is that, facing the object of communication that we value, in order to make the conversation smoother, the speaker will want to put the listener in the same position, so that the listener and the object have the same relationship as the speaker.With temporary ownership, such as 2.2 and 2.3.For the characters we like or care about, we are all willing to get closer to them and impose a virtual possessive relationship of ownership, such as 2.4.These two psychological motivations seem to be different, but actually they use possessive relationship to close the relationships, and they are similar.Under such positive psychological motivations, the subjectivisation usages express concerning or complimentary positive semantics [14][15].

"Wuri + idol" Introduced into Chinese
Language evolution can be divided into "internallly motivated change" and "externally motivated change ", with the latter mainly referring to "contact-induced evolution".[1] The appearance of the expression "wuri + idol" in Chinese has both internal factors and external factors from Language contact.
The expression "wuri + idol" was introduced into Chinese Korean as shown in figure 2.

Psychological Commonality
In spoken Chinese, there is a phenomenon that empathy effect is realized through subjectivisation of personal pronouns."Our" is often used to refer to "your".For example: (1) (Asking about your friend's mother:) Does our mother adapt after retirement?
(2) (the teacher of the training class to the students' parents:) Our child is very talented.
(3) (the mother encouraged her child face to face.)Our Guoguo is the bravest, not afraid of difficulties.
(4) (The wife introduced her husband to her friends.)Our Mr. Zhang is busy with his work and often doesn't eat at home.
Empathy, which plays a positive role in promoting communication, is a psychological motivation with cross-ethnic commonality.The subjectivisation of personal pronouns is its performance in language use.Therefore, the usage of 2.2 and 2.3 exist simultaneously in Chinese and Korean.

The influence of Korean pop culture
Language contact is a common phenomenon among languages, which starts from vocabulary and is mainly found in vocabulary.[4] Identifying language influence components is the basis and premise of studying Language contact.[2] He Yang divided Language contact into direct contact and indirect contact according to the way.Direct contact is Language contact that the two sides of contact are not separated in time and space, which is generally realized through oral communication; Indirect contact is a Language contact in which the two parties are separated in time and space, which is generally achieved through written translation.[3] The expression "wuri + idol" was mainly introduced into Chinese as a result of indirect contact between Korean and Chinese languages.
The spread of Korean popular culture in China and the popularity of the Internet have greatly promoted the depth and breadth of the contact between Korean and Chinese languages.CCTV began to introduce Korean TV dramas more than 20 years ago.Since then, Korean TV dramas have been popular in various TV stations.Since 2003, China has successively had performers go to Korea as trainees and join Korean groups.Some of them have become famous in Korea and returned to China, such as Han Ggeng, Lu Han, Wu Yifan, Huang Zitao, Zhang Bichen, etc. Thus the way Korean fans address their idols, "government+idol name", has also spread to China, and has been popularized on the Internet by their huge number of fans in China, rapidly becoming a popular language in Chinese at that time.The usage of "wuri + idol name" is not only used by Chinese fans to address Korean stars, but also used to address Chinese stars with Korean performance background, even local stars without Korean performance background.
The usage of "wuri + idol name" is used as an intimate name or nickname in Korea, and it is generally only used for female idols.In China, since most of the trainees in Korea are male, this usage is generally used for male idols.Overall, this applies to male and female idols, and there is no obvious age limit.Compared with the usage of Korean, Chinese has expanded the scope of application of idols to a certain extent.At the same time, in order to eliminate language barriers, they imitated the pronunciation of "wuri" with Chinese pinyin or Chinese characters, and developed two variants of "wuli + idol name" or "in the house + idol name", such as "wuli Han Geng (Han Geng, used to be a trainee in Korea and joined the well-known Korean group Super Junior, then left the group and returned to China to develop)", "wuli Fanfan" (Wu Yifan, who was a trainee in Korea and officially debuted with EXO, and then left the group to return to China for development), "wuli Taotao" (Huang Zitao, who was a trainee in Korea and made his official debut with EXO, and left the group Returning to China to develop), "wuli Bichen (Zhang Bichen, who officially debuted as a member of the Korean girl group SunnyDays, and then returned to China to develop)", " in the house Lu Han " (Luhan, who was a trainee in Korea and made his official debut with EXO, and then left the group and returned to China to develop), " in the house Junkai (Wang Junkai, local singer)", "wuli Dong (Jin Dong, local actor)" and so on.
The differences of "our + idol" between Korean and Chinese is shown in figure 3.
Figure 3: The Differences of "our + idol" between Korean and Chinese

"Amazing my X!"
Gradually, the expression "wuri + idol" developed into the expression " Amazing my X!" as shown in figure 4.
Figure 4: From "wuri + idol" to "Amazing my X!" The usage of "wuli/in the house + idol" in the Chinese fan group is the product of the Korean "wuri + idol" exported to Chinese, but it is not the end point.Instead, it takes the psychological commonness of "empathy" as an opportunity and combines the characteristics of Chinese itself to further localize and generate other language forms.First of all, "wuli/in the house" is a Chinese transliteration of the Korean personal pronoun "wuri", which does not match the form and meaning.The audience is limited to young ethnic groups who have some knowledge of Korean pop culture.If it is replaced by "our", it is usually necessary to add "de (of)" before adding nouns, and the Chinese modifier is in the best form of two-syllable in syllable length.Therefore, subjectivisation "my" as the starting point of empathy is more in line with Chinese expression habits.Secondly, the objects of empathy are not limited to idols, and all kinds of personnel and objects can become the objects for speakers to express praise, admiration or pride.
In recent years, "Amazing my X!" has become a buzzword on the Internet, and has been on the hot search headlines of various media for many times.The number of news involving "Amazing my X!" in Xinhuanet alone has reached millions.CCTV Finance and Economics Channel has also launched a series of documentaries entitled "Amazing my Country".The following are some news headlines we found in CNKI.
(1) Amazing my country!(China Youth Daily, August 15, 2017) (2) Amazing my communication!4G signal covers seven islands and reefs in the Nansha Islands (People's Post and Telecommunications, July 15, 2017) (3) Amazing my Forbidden City! (China Culture Daily, July 24, 2017) According to the survey, the original form of "Amazing my X!" is "awesome my brother", which has been popular on the Internet since 2016.As for its provenance, the most widely circulated statement is that a middle school student was caught playing a game in military training by the instructor, and then the instructor helped him finish the game.In the process of the game, the instructor was particularly powerful, and opened the big kill and special kill mode, and the teammates said: "Amazing my brother!"!It is used to express admiration for the excellent instructor.
After investigation, we found that in the routine of "Amazing my X!", the scope of application of "X" is extremely wide, involving all kinds of people and things.Although "amazing" is the most commonly used, it can also be replaced by other praise-like adjectives.We found some replacement forms in the corpus, such as "So beautiful my sister!" "So cute my younger brother!" "Awesome my sister-in-law!" and so on.Only "my" cannot be replaced.After further verification of the content of the main body of the news, it is found that the usage of "my" seems to be common, but it is actually an expansion of conventional usage and used in a specific context.Let's look at the following news examples.
(4)In the photo, Wang Junkai played the role of man as a woman, put on long wavy hair, and wore cat ears with charming expression.As soon as the photo came out, many netizens gathered to watch "Amazing my brother!He's the prettiest no matter what."(People's Daily Online, October 26, 2016) (5) Amazing my Two Sessions: Listen to Foreign Minister Wang Yi's response to the world trend.(People's Daily Online, March 24, 2017) (6)During the Spring Festival this year, more than 100000 passengers per day were sent at the peak of the eastern section of the high-speed railway around the island, 20 times the original design.This is the epitome of the rapid and healthy development of China's economy and society, and is an important sign of "Amazing my country!" (People's Daily Online, Feburary 4, 2017) Next comes the bright spot.According to the information from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the machine is equipped with 16 megapixel cameras in front and behind.Amazing Sansung!Is Samsung also trying to win the hearts of girls who love selfie?(People's Daily Online, December 4, 2016) The original meaning of "my" is a nominal possessive pronoun, indicating the possesive relationship.Something is owned by me or someone has a relationship with me.However, from the above news scenes, we can see that in the "Amazing my X!" structure, "my" does not mean affiliation.In example (20), Wang Junkai is not the brother of netizens, but a star.Netizens are here to express their admiration for their idols.In example (21) and example (22), if "my two sessions" and "my country" are used separately, they do not conform to the habit of Chinese, and should be changed to "our two sessions" and "our country"."My" is used in this sentence pattern to strengthen the speaker's pride.It seems that this part can be replaced with "ours", but its distribution is not the same.In this sentence pattern, "my" is only used to express pride or praise, while "our" has no similar restrictions, so even if "my" is replaced with "our", it does not represent the conventional possession.As for example (23), "my Samsung" doesn't express possession at all.The speaker has no relationship with Samsung, just to express strong praise.
To sum up, "my" in the sentence pattern "Amazing my X!" is the de-possession and subjectivisation usage of personal pronoun, aimed at expressing pride, combining "awesome" and inverted sentence pattern, and expressing strong praise.Compared with the Korean "wuri + idol name", the psychological and linguistic principles are the same, but the scope of application is wider.
The semantic features of "Amazing my X!" is shown in figure 5.
Figure 5: semantic features of "Amazing my X!"

Conclusions
Facing the communication object we value, in order to make the conversation more smooth, the speaker will want to put the listener in the same position, so that the listener and the object have the same relationship with the speaker, with the temporary ownership relationship; For the people and things we like or care about, we instinctively want to close the relationship, and do not hesitate to add virtual ownership relationship.This is the common psychological feature of human beings.It is manifested in the language that the subjectivisation usage of "wuri/our/my" appears, which is a common means of "empathy".
With the development of the Internet, buzzwords emerge in endlessly, and frequent cultural exchanges between countries have become a hotbed of language contact.Many buzzwords have an international background and are mixed with foreign language elements.The usage of "wuri + idol name" in Korean is widely used.The same psychological motivation, coupled with the spread of Korean dramas and Korean star culture, makes the use of "wuli/in the house + idol name" also appear in Chinese, which is a transliteration variant of "wuri + idol name".At the same time, in the process of further localization, the sentence pattern "Amazing my X!" has been developed with a wider range of application.
This language example vividly demonstrates the semantic transformation of localization triggered by language contact and promoted by social events under the same cultural and psychological commonality.This process also has distinct contemporary characteristics, which can provide us with analytical ideas for other cases of buzzwords or language contact.