chapter  A culture-neutral metalanguage for mental state concepts Clif Goddard In contemporary cognitive science, mental state concepts from diverse cultures are typically described via English-speciic words for emotions, cognitive processes, and the like. his is terminological ethnocentrism and it produces inaccurate rep- resentations of indigenous meanings. he problem can be overcome by employing a metalanguage of conceptual analysis which is based on simple meanings such as know , think, want and feel. Cross-linguistic semantic research suggests that these and other semantic primes are shared across all languages and cultures (God- dard and Wierzbicka 2002; cf. Wierzbicka 1999; Harkins & Wierzbicka 2001). Ater summarising this research, the chapter shows how complex mental state concepts from English, Malay, Swedish, and Korean can be revealingly analysed into terms which are simple, clear and transposable across languages. 1 Introduction Taking a global perspective, there is tremendous variation in the lexicon of mental states. Most words in the English lexicon of cognition, including apparently “ba- sic” ones, are language and culture-speciic (Harkins & Wierzbicka 2001; Palmer, Goddard & Lee 2003; Wierzbicka 1999). his applies, inter alia, to words for emo- tional and attitudinal states (such as angry, happy, surprised, love, anxiety, grief, and so on), for epistemic states and cognitive processes (such as believe, doubt, remember), and for psychological constructs (such as mind, psyche, memory, and so on). As amply demonstrated in many studies in cross-linguistic semantics and linguistic anthropology, such words rarely have exact meaning equivalents in oth- er languages. Many social scientists, unfortunately, seem to regard the “problem of translation” simply as a methodological hindrance – as something to be “gotten around” so that they can move on to implementing familiar research techniques. Indigenous concepts are typically tagged with English glosses, and the crude tech- Goddard, Cliff. 2007. A culture-neutral metalanguage for mental state concepts. In Schalley, Andrea C. and Khlentzos, Drew (eds.), Mental states, Vol II: Language and cognitive structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 11-35.