MULTIFUNCTIONALITY OF THE CATEGORIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ARTICLE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Noting the relevance of studying foreign languages, in particular the English language, this article discusses the categorical meanings of the article and its multifunctionality in the sentence when constructing the utterance. The authors emphasize that the article in English philology is an ambiguous phenomenon, and many questions of this sphere of study are still debatable. This study presents an analysis of the approaches existing in linguistics to the study of a given linguistic and phenomenon, as well as the most controversial points for its consideration. It is argued that the articles, as well as auxiliary verbs, have no lexical meaning, but have only certain functions. The question remains about the functions of the article, and about which of them is primary. It is shown that the article (along with prepositions) belongs to the class of accompanying nouns and is intended to convey the meaning of abstractness or concreteness of the latter. The following textual functions of the article are distinguished in the study: cataphoric (an individualizing attribute is expressed in the language context to the right of the name group), and anaphoric (the individualizing attribute is expressed in the language context to the left of the name group). Considering the functions and values of the article using specific examples presented in the article, the authors consider it necessary to master the grammatical expressions of the functions of the article, such as marking the categories of certainty, uncertainty, correlation, non-correlation, as well as the expression of anaphoric and cataphoric functions, which will contribute to a deeper understanding of such an important phenomena in the English language as an article and a general increase in the quality of knowledge of a foreign language (English).