Phraseologies realising synthetic personalization in travel articles

Travel articles in news outlets are a complex product that caters for a variety of
needs, from entertainment to mediation between different cultures to the provision
of detailed practical information and expert advice concerning holidays. The key
aspects of infotainment, guidance, and commercialization in this type of discourse
require a communicative style in which discourse produced in the public domain
can be privately consumed within the context of today’s consumerist culture. A
model of this is provided by Fairclough’s (1989:203-205; 1992:92) notion of
synthetic personalization, according to which public domain discourse has been
colonized by a practice that is evocative of private communication as an effective
answer to the necessity to address a mass of anonymous readers/consumers as if
they were an actual individual.
In our study, we adopt a phraseological approach, which sheds light on recurrent,
complex discursive patterns, allowing us to study the extent and way in which MultiWord Units (henceforth MWUs) directly addressing the individual reader contribute
to realize the practice of synthetic personalization in the discourse of travel
journalism.