Ambiguity is one of fundamental properties of any language. The emergence of polysemy is connected with the result of the natural language development and the conditions for its functioning as a means of communication. Existing at various linguistic levels: lexical, grammatical, syntactic, homonymy can be the basis of ambiguity. Lexical and grammatical homonyms appearing in the process of the his-torical development of the language reduce the number of linguistic forms, give the expressiveness to the utterance and can be the basis for creating texts based on a play on words. However, semantic homonymy can make it difficult to understand state-ments, especially when translating jokes into another language. Recreating a pun, translators can make typical mistakes reproducing literally the semantics of the core elements, then it can lead to a violation of the norms of the target language, and the creation of texts that are beyond the understanding of the recipients. The ambiguity arising at the syntactic level is the implementation of such a non-standard connection of words in a sentence as a two-way communication, in which a word or phrase is subordinate not to one, but several dominants simultane-ously. This type of homonymy is presented in two varieties of homonyms: structural homonyms, which, being subordinate to any of several possible dominants, not only do not change the meaning of the utterance, but also give the speech more expressiveness, and syntactic homonyms, which make the addressee choose one of several possible meanings of the utterance. It is this kind of syntactic homonymy that is a negative phenomenon that impedes the process of communication, and, therefore, in need of elimination. This article examines the influence of syntactic and semantic homonymy on the process of speech perception. The paper points out the positive and negative as-pects of semantic ambiguity that affects the understanding of statements when creat-ing puns and translating them from Russian into English, examines the reasons for the emergence of syntactic homonyms in the Russian language, proves the patterns functionality of the text initial perception based on the rules of semantic combination of words.