Aspects of synthetic personalization reflected in travel journalism: A phraseological approach

This study shows how the commercial orientation of travel journalism may be reflected and reproduced by the pervasive usage of synthetic personalization. This is a mass communication technique simulating an informal, face-to-face interaction between the authors and their readerships with the goal of constructing a consumption community characterised by a shared lifestyle. This promotional strategy is studied by means of a corpus-driven phraseological approach and shown to be notably productive. Two groups of phraseologies are identified and then the most frequent of each group is analysed to show their discursive functions with respect to the market-driven nature of the register.