up-stairs

Adverb

upstairs (comparative further upstairs or farther upstairs, superlative furthest upstairs or farthest upstairs)

1. Up the stairs; on or to a higher floor or level.
   • I’ll take my shoes and put them away the next time I go upstairs.
2. (informal) In the brain or mind.
   • After Joe did a hula dance on the kitchen table, his friends wondered if he didn’t have a lot going on upstairs.
3. (informal) In heaven, especially with regard to where a deity might be found.
4. In or to a higher matrix clause, as opposed to a lower embedded clause.
   • Consider first the derivation in which movement is not involved, namely the surface subject is base-generated in the matrix clause (Recall that it is possible in principle to base generate the subject upstairs, as we saw in Section 2).2007, Tomohiro Fujii, “Cyclic chain reduction”, in Norbert Carver, Jairo Nunes, editors, The Copy Theory of Movement (Linguistik Aktuell; 107), Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →DOI...

See all 9 meanings of upstairs