Lexico-semantic variants of the verb "serve" in Russian and its equivalents in Persian

This article analyzes the formation of polysemy of the verb "to serve" from the point of view of the prototypical theory and compares the Russian word "to serve" with its Persian equivalents. The prototypical approach or prototype theory is a new approach to the phenomena of categorization, to the concept as a structure containing indications of which elements of the concept are prototypes. However, due to the polysemy of this verb in the Russian language, foreign students studying Russian as a non-native language make mistakes when using and translating this verb into Persian. To avoid such mistakes, one should first find the lexical-semantic variants of the word "to serve" in Russian and find suitable equivalents for these meanings. Thus, the purpose of the article is, firstly, to determine the lexicalsemantic variants of the word "to serve" using the prototypical approach and, secondly, to find equivalents for these meanings in the Persian language. To achieve this goal, having analyzed the explanatory dictionaries of S. I. Ozhegov, F.F. Ushakov and V.I. Dahl, three lexical-semantic variants were identified on the basis of the prototypical approach. In order to determine the frequency of the verb "to serve" and identify its equivalents in Persian, we considered four works of Russian classical literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the novels "War and Peace" by L.N. Tolstoy, "Crime and Punishment" by F.M. Dostoevsky, "Mother" by M. Gorky, and "The Master and Margarita" by M.A. Bulgakov. We found 156 sentences containing the verb "to serve" in its different lexical-semantic variants along with their translations into Persian. Statistical method was used to determine the frequency. The material was collected using the continuous sampling method. It was revealed that the lexical-semantic variant of the word "to serve": "to do something" is the most commonly used, while the lexical-semantic variant of this word: "to perform a church service" is used less frequently.