M. Iriskulov, A. Kuldashev a course in Theoretical English Grammar Tashkent 2008

IV. The abnormal factor. Linguistics has always been a normocentric 
discipline. It means that linguists have analyzed "correct" texts only. It has never 
been clear what is to be done with "wrong" texts. Stories derived by illiterate 
people, foreigners or mentally sick individuals were merely defined as "incorrect' 
and, therefore, not considered worth studying at all. However, those texts do exist, 
so something must be done with them. The term "wrong" is not a very lucky one, 
because it adds nothing to the understanding of what those texts are actually like 
and what are the mechanisms that bring them into being. It was the Russian 
academician L.V. Scherba that suggested the term "negative speech material", 
including everything that does not meet the existing norms and standards. Here are 
some genres or types of the text that L.V. Scherba considers negative: 
1. Children's speech; 
2. Mistakes in adults' speech; 
3. Foreigners'speech; 
4. Speech in stress situations; 
5. Speech disturbances. 
Without any doubt all those phenomena are worth studying too. 
Psycho linguistics is an interdisciplinary study of language development, 
language in relation to human mind, language in thought, etc. Therefore the 
analysis of different language units and structures can hardly be separated from the 

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study of human mind and the way it functions. Let us proceed from the assumption 
that there are two spheres in human soul: the conscious sphere and the 
subconscious one. We will talk about those spheres in the next chapter. 
When studying different aspects of the subconscious sphere, modern 
psychologists use the term "MIND SET". 
It was D.N. Uznadze, a Georgian psychologist, who defined mind set as a 
state that precedes every human activity, including speaking. It is a special form of 
soul modification that underlies every involvement into the world. The mind set is 
the person's readiness to perform an action, it is the modality of human behavior. 
D.N. Uznadze shows that it is in the mind set that the person's need and the 
concrete situation are reflected in the form of a drive. So the mind set is the 
beginning of every human activity, and it underlies both conscious and 
subconscious behavior. 
Speaking about the language, we can think of two possible mind sets that 
underlie the process of speaking: