Modality of verbs as stylometric feature in Czech genres

Abstract

The goal of the study is to analyze modality of verbs from the perspective of its usage in different types of Czech texts. The analysis is based on data from the Czech National Corpus, specifically the balanced corpus of contemporary written Czech SYN2020, which contains 100 million words. The proportion of modal verbs to all verbs is used to measure modality. Furthermore, different types of modality are considered: necessity and possibility. The findings reveal distinct patterns in the use of modal verbs in different genres. Thus, index of modality seems to be a promising stylometric feature. Non-fiction literature, especially administrative texts, exhibits the highest modality. In contrast fiction texts, namely poetry, has the lowest modality.