An Analysis Of Qilai (起来) And Shang (上) In Initiation Meaning

Chinese charactor “qilai” and “shang” in initiation meaning are used in ModernChinese frequently. Though being researched in many articles,“qilai” and “shang”rarely contrasted systematically. In this article,”qilai” and “shang” are divided intotwo categories, tendency semantics and initiation semantics. The second one has beenresearched in this article. With much investigation of the texts in the corpus, manysimilar usages have been found in their distribution, grammatical meaning, etc. So, inmany cases, they can replace with each other in the sentences. After furthercomparison, some tiny differences in semantics have been found between these twowords when used in initiation meaning. There are also some differences in the usagefrequency of these two words and the tenses of the sentences in which “qilai” and“shang” are used. So, in some cases, these two words cannot replace with each otherin the sentences.This article is divided into three parts, the first part is about detailing descriptionof the adjectives, verbs and VP phrase in “qilai2” and “shang2”; the second part isabout comparison of two structures “X qilai2” and “X shang2”; In the third part, wetried to explain this kind of phenomenon in terms of the semantic evolvement andphonetic law.