Of the republic of uzbekistan tashkent state pedagogical university namedafter nizami

The scientific novelty of the study lies in a comprehensive analysis of the structural and quantitative characteristics of homonymy with the involvement of homonyms of all three substantive and formal subtypes, in determining both the nature of the formal semantic relations between homonymous units and the degree of interaction between homonyms in a pair, identifying the main reasons contributing to the increase in the number lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical homonyms in English.
The theoretical significance of the study is determined primarily by the fact that the results obtained contribute to the establishment and description of the essence of homonymy as a linguistic phenomenon, contribute to clarifying the linguistic status of homonymy, determining a further research strategy in the field of English homonymy based on an integrated approach to describing the formal and meaningful features of homonyms . The conducted research makes it possible to reveal the patterns of formation of various classes of homonyms and opens up new prospects for their study.
The practical value of the study lies in the fact that the results obtained can be used in lectures and practical classes on general and comparative linguistics, lexicology, the history of the language, when writing term papers and final qualifying works, in the course of developing special courses on relevant topics, in compiling tests and sets of exercises for the use of homonyms.
The list of homonymous groups presented in the Appendix can serve as the basis for creating an explanatory dictionary of English homonyms, the tasks of which are to describe the complex structure of English homonyms,
highlighting the ways of development of lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical homonymy in the English language, assessing the degree of productivity of each of the identified paths, as well as identifying the nature of the relationship between homonymous words.
Scope and structure of work. The dissertation consists of an introduction, two chapters, accompanied by conclusions, conclusions, lists of references and lexicographical sources, appendices.

CHAPTER I. LINGUISTIC STATUS OF HOMONYMY AS A LINGUISTIC UNIVERSAL

1.1. The main approaches to the study of homonymy as a linguistic phenomenon
The English language is characterized by a fairly significant number of homonyms compared to other languages. In addition, one cannot fail to note also the large increase in the number of homonyms that took place in the course of the historical development of the English language and to a certain extent distinguishes modern English from the English of the ancient period: cf., for example, yes. sunne sun and sunu son at present³. 
However, no matter how significant the number of homonyms may seem, even in English, in which, according to the observations of researchers, there are much more homonymous units than in Russian, in general, homonymy is not as common as polysemy, despite the fact that it permeates not only vocabulary, but also morphology, word formation, syntax. In general, in modern English, homonyms make up no more than 16-18% of the total vocabulary, and the number of homonyms within the same part of speech does not exceed 8-9% .
However, it should be emphasized that the opinions of scientists about the usefulness - harmfulness of homonymy are very ambiguous.
The fact that the emergence of homonyms reduces the number of language forms leads some authors to conclude that homonymy is a useful phenomenon. So E. Buissans believes that homonymy, like polysemy, "serves the benefit of the speakers" . According to Mauler, homonymy "contributes to the compactness of the language, and this is a positive phenomenon".
Such an approach to evaluating the role of homonymy in a language seems to be one-sided. Homonymy, of course, contributes to the “compactness of the language”, but “this compactness is achieved due to an increase in the ambiguity of the units of the expression plan, i.e., due to the deterioration of the coding properties of the language.” Therefore, it would be wrong to consider it a “positive” phenomenon .
It is quite obvious that homonymy, while erasing formal differences between signs with different content, cannot but reduce the effectiveness of language as a means of communication. E. Eman believes that a hindrance to the language is everything that violates its clarity and unambiguity. Therefore, homonymy, which leads to confusion and misunderstandings, is also perceived as a hindrance. However, statements of the opposite nature are much more common. The authors of many works on homonymy and general linguistics believe that the language usually does not experience any inconvenience from the existence of homonyms and that homonymy usually does not interfere with understanding, since homonyms are delimited for the listener by context and situation . L. A. Bulakhovsky notes that homonymy is not as dangerous as one might think, based on general considerations alone:
Thus, the opinion that homonymy, although it violates the "law of the sign", does not cause difficulties in the process of communication, has become a commonplace in linguistics. However, there are facts that cast doubt on the validity of this opinion. First, all statements of this kind are purely speculative and are not supported by observational or experimental data based on an objective methodology. Secondly, these statements are in themselves contradictory. After all, if we recognize that in order to remove the ambiguity caused by homonymy, the listener needs to refer to the context, then this already means that homonymy delays the communication process, since the very appeal to the context should obviously require certain efforts from the listener and, therefore, some time costs. .
The conclusion suggests itself that the opinion about the "harmlessness" of homonymy, expressed by many linguists, is explained by the fact that the number of homonyms in the languages ​​they studied is relatively small. If a sentence containing a homonymous form has several “key” words that make it possible to unambiguously determine the content of this form, then there is almost no interference from homonymy. But if the "key" word is itself ambiguous and needs to be based on contextual data, then understanding the word becomes very difficult, if not impossible.
It can be concluded that in this work, the most acceptable is the opinion that homonymy to some extent complicates the process of communication and requires additional efforts in the transmission or perception of information. And despite the fact that in English the saturation threshold of the language with homonyms has not yet been reached, their quantitative and qualitative study is important, in particular, when developing methods for their translation and studying their influence on the language system as a whole. The next paragraph presents a quantitative description of homonyms in English in order to more clearly represent their distribution by class and determine their place in the language system.