Contrastive semantics and cultural psychology: English heart vs. Malay hati Cliff Goddard Abstract This is a contrastive analysis of two ethnopsychological constructs (English heart, Malay hati), using the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) ap- proach to semantic description (Wierzbicka 1996). Rejecting the use of English-specific meta-terminology, such as mind, cognition, affect, etc., as both ethnocentric and inaccurate, the study seeks to articulate the concep- tual content of the words under investigation in terms of simple universal concepts such as FEEL, THINK, WANT, KNOW, PEOPLE, SOMEONE, PART, BODY, HAPPEN, GOOD and BAD. For both words, the physical body-part meaning is first explicated, and then the ethnopsychological sense or senses (it is claimed that English heart has two distinct ethnopsychological senses). The paper also reviews the phraseology associated with each word, and in the case of English heart, proposes explications for a number of prominent collocations: a broken heart, listening to your heart, losing heart, and having your heart in it. The concluding discussion makes some suggestions about experiential/semantic principles whereby body-parts can come to be associated with cultural models of feeling, thinking, wanting, and knowing. At a theoretical level, the study seeks to draw links between culturally-informed cognitive semantics, on the one hand, and the field of cultural psychology, as practised by Richard Shweder and associates. Keywords: lexical semantics, NSM, emotion, body-parts, English, Malay, cognitive linguistics, ethnopsychology 1. Introduction The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) literature includes significant studies of ethnopsychological concepts in different languages, including Anna Wierzbicka’s (1992, 2005) seminal studies of Russian duša and com-