When expressing motion events in modern Chinese, both V-guòlái (过来) and V-shànglái (上来) can represent the movement of approaching, such as zhuī guòlái (追过来) and zhuī guòlái (追上来) ‘catch up’. However, in certain cases, they cannot be interchanged, such as jià guòlái (嫁过来) and *jià shànglái (嫁上来) ‘marry up’, bān guòlái (搬过来) and bān shànglái (搬上来) ‘move up’. This study compares V-guòlái and V-shànglái from three perspectives: semantic composition, features of verbs and objects using corpus analysis based language component substitution and semantic analysis. The findings are as follows: First, the main semantic difference affects event outcome and semantic focus. In terms of the event outcome, V-guòlái emphasis the action process, while V-shànglái focuses on the action result. In terms of the semantic focus, V-guòlái focuses on lái and V-shànglái focuses on shàng, the semantic focus is not symmetric. Secondly, when they are used as the complements, whether guòlái and shànglái can be interchangeable depends on the semantic features of their corresponding main verbs. Finally, when a nominal object N is inserted to the sentence structure, it generally serves as the figure for the sentences like V-guò-N-lái, whereas for sentences like V-shàng-N-lái, N can either be the figure or the ground. In phrases such as V-guòlái/shànglái-N, N is generally used as a figure.