Syntax and Creolization in Cross-cultural Readings of Rooms

Exposing respondents from an English mainly traditional furnishing culture to photographs of Danish mainly modernist domestic interiors, and vice versa, an analysis of these cross-cultural readings of rooms explores shifts in encoded and decoded social and cultural meanings of the consumption contexts shown. The paper demonstrates the role and cultural specificity of product syntax in the readings, and examines the coping strategies of respondents when faced with the incompletely understood messages of a foreign Aconsumption language@Bcoping strategies which from both a cultural analysis and a marketing perspective become particularly interesting when understood as creolizations.