This project is an off-shoot of the FWO senior research project G004121N “Transitivity oppositions in a diachronic typological perspective: Labile Verbs in the history of the Indo-European languages”, which aims to find out how the system of labile verbs in several Indo-European language families evolved, and in particular, why there are such great differences between the families regarding the increase or decrease of productivity of lability. Historical Chinese, the empirical domain of the current project, offers an interesting comparative perspective in this respect, and adds an additional typological dimension: as a consequence of macro-typological changes, c.q. the rise of bisyllabic verbs, which can be analysed as the grammaticalization of a formal expression of a transitivizing functional head in the verbal spine, lability is lost in the course of Chinese language history. The aim of the current sub-project is to chart the kinds of changes and their determinants, and compare them to similar phenomena across language families.