Abstract
The article examines the historical and comparative aspects of the verb ait (“to say”) in the 14th-century Mamluk-Kipchak monument Gulistan bit Turki, translated by Seyf-i Sarayi. The study focuses on the valency of the verb as a key category determining its syntactic and semantic potential. Through corpus-based analysis of more than 1,300 tokens, the research identifies the structural patterns of ait in relation to its actants—subject, object, addressee, and modifier and compares them with modern Kazakh usage. The results demonstrate that ait historically exhibited a high degree of valency, forming up to six-actant structures, while maintaining syntactic stability. In medieval Turkic, ait functioned as a multivalent lexeme encompassing meanings such as "to say," "to command," "to declare," and "to confess," which in modern Kazakh have differentiated into several verbs (aytu, soyleu, deu, zhariyalau, buyruu, moyyndau). This semantic narrowing illustrates a diachronic process in which syntactic frameworks remain conservative, whereas semantic roles undergo specialization. The analysis also highlights how valency reflects not only grammatical combinability but also sociocultural patterns of communication characteristic of the Mamluk-Kipchak era. By tracing the historical evolution of the verb ait, the study contributes to understanding the mechanisms of syntactic continuity and semantic differentiation in the development of the Kazakh language and Turkic verbal systems in general.