"Yeah, it's funny how words can be so open to interpretation" - The effect of intralingual subtitling on characterisation in Breaking Bad

Abstract

This research investigates the effects of intralingual (or same language) subtitling on characterisation, with a specific focus on the AMC drama, Breaking Bad. A corpus-stylistic approach was used, with a focus on several characters. Corpora of the subtitle track to the third season were compared with similar corpora containing the transcribed speech of the same season, in order to generate data which could then be compared. Sub-corpora were also created for the eight individual characters chosen to research. In order to investigate the stylistic side of the research, Jonathan Culpeper's triggers of characterisation were utilised, and Paul Rayson's Wmatrix corpus software was then used to identify statistically significant words and domains. This list was compared against the statistics produced by Wmatrix in order to understand their significance, if any. The differences and similarities between the subtitle corpora and the spoken corpora for each individual character were investigated, as well as more general trends which were shown to occur throughout all of the data. The subtitle data proved particularly cohesive with the spoken data, meaning that the subtitles were remarkably faithful to the original dialogue, with a much lower level of reduction than most other subtitles. Efforts appeared to be taken to preserve certain linguistic features often considered for deletion by subtitles, a number of these relating to characterisation