This dissertation is concerned with style in subtitles and has two interconnected aims. Firstly, it aims to conceptualise style in the meaning-making context of subtitled film and television drama drawing on dialogical and hermeneutic thought. Secondly, it aims to implement this conceptualisation empirically to show how selected style markers shape textual features and contribute to characterisation in film and television drama subtitles.

The dialogical approach to style in subtitles introduced in response to the first aim suggests that the purpose of subtitles is to mediate those (not necessarily all) meanings of the dialogue-in-context that will enable viewers in a different linguistic, sociocultural and historical context to engage as fully as possible with the audiovisual target text. Three mixed methods studies are carried out to fulfil the second aim, each focusing on a specific style marker at a different level of the text (graphical, morphological and lexical). The material is the same for all three studies and comprises fifteen film and television dramas with English dialogue and Swedish subtitles.

The first study explores punctuation marks with a specific focus on exclamation marks. It suggests that a low average sentence length and a high share of tonal marks are typical features of film and television drama subtitles. However, the study also shows that punctuation texture is context-dependent and that punctuation mark choices contribute to characterisation in interaction with many other semiotic resources in the narrative context of the moving audiovisual text. The second study investigates long and short forms of two Swedish indefinite pronouns. The findings indicate that word form choices are stylistically meaningful and contribute to highlight aspects of temporality, literacy/orality, emphasis and social relations/settings. Subtitle reading speed was not found to be a decisive factor for word form choices. The third study presents a comprehensive investigation of address forms (vocatives and address pronouns). The results show a surprisingly similar, and relatively high, share of address forms between subtitles and corresponding dialogue. Pronominal T/V choices, which are unavailable in English, were found to enrich the subtitled target texts by foregrounding various aspects of character relations beyond those expressed in the spoken dialogue.

The application of the dialogical approach shifts subtitles from being seen in terms of loss in relation to the dialogue, to recognizing their contributions to the dialogue-in-context. Furthermore, the empirical findings underline the importance of stylistic meaning-making for characterisation in film and television drama subtitles.