This article looks at the case of Elena Ferrante, the (presumed) pseudonym of an internationally successful Italian novelist, and has two objectives: first, to observe how her novels are positioned in the panorama of modern Italian literature (represented by an ad hoc reference corpus—composed of 150 novels by forty different authors) and, second, to attempt to understand whether, amongst the authors in the corpus, there are any that can be considered candidates for involvement in the writing of the novels signed Ferrante. Consistent with these two objectives, the analyses also use two methods: correspondence analysis for the content mapping of the novels and Labbé’s intertextual distances to establish a measure of similarity between the novels. In the results, we do not see the expected similarities with writers from the Naples area as Elena Ferrante distinguishes herself with original literary products that, both in terms of theme and style, show her strong individuality. Amongst the authors included, Domenico Starnone, who has been previously identified by other investigations as the possible hand behind this pen name, is the author who has written novels most similar to those of Ferrante and which, over time, has become progressively more similar.

Moving from Labbé’s proposal envisaging the use of intertextual distance to measure the similarity (and dissimilarity) of texts, this paper proposes a new calculation procedure based on repeated observations of intertextual distance between pairs of equal-sized text chunks. The implementation of this procedure on a large corpus including 160 Italian novels provides information on the values produced by measuring intertextual distance in (both lemmatized and non-lemmatized) literary texts written in Italian. In order to show the improvement achieved through this iterative procedure compared to the original version, distance values are assessed in terms of their ability to recognize the author as the factor responsible for text pairing.

Statistical and linguistic procedures were implemented to analyze a large corpus of texts written by 37 individuals with autism and 92 facilitators (without disabilities), producing written conversations by means of PCs. Such texts were compared and contrasted to identify the specific traits of the lexis of the group of individuals with autism and assess to what extent it differed from the lexis of the facilitators. The purpose of this research was to identify specific language features using statistical procedures to analyze contingency lexical tables that reported on the frequencies of words and grammatical categories in different subcorpora and among different writers. The results support the existence of lexis and distributional patterns of grammatical categories that are characteristic of the written production of individuals with autism and that are different from those of facilitators.