This study investigates the diachronic evolution of four object-involving syntactic structures formed with the Mandarin complex directional complement (CDC) qǐlái ‘get up’ from the 12th to early 20th centuries, using data from the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) corpus. Frequency distributions and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) show that these structures did not undergo simple replacement but instead developed through gradual functional differentiation. Mid-object (mid-O) emerged earliest and remained the most frequent pattern, developing as a relatively neutral and processual structure more strongly associated with event unfolding and with new, indefinite and non-patient objects. Pre-object (pre-O) appeared later, peaked in the 17th century and was increasingly restricted to state-change events, a development related to its verb–object (V–O) adjacency and subsequent competition from ba-O. Ba object (ba-O) became increasingly prominent over time and reached its highest proportion in the 19th century, becoming specialized for foregrounding cognitively accessible and highly affected objects. Although post-O remained rare, qualitative evidence suggests a degree of specialization in evaluative uses, where the postverbal object serves as an anchor for subsequent judgment or description. These findings contribute to a usage-based understanding of syntactic change by showing how formally related variants come to be differentiated through the interaction of structural, cognitive and language-specific factors.