Distinctive Lexical Traits in Andrea Camilleri: A Keyness Measures Analysis of a Corpus of Sellerio Crime Novels.

The umbrella term keyness is widely used in text analysis to denote a range of quantitative measures aimed atidentifying distinctive words of a text or a class of texts. Over time, numerous approaches to keyness have beendeveloped, reflecting different theoretical perspectives and methodological needs. Drawing on a corpus of 78 Italiancrime novels written by 16 authors and published by Sellerio, this study investigates the concept of keyness witha twofold objective. First, it assesses the strengths and limitations of different keyness measures by examining theirconsistency, degree of overlap, and practical applicability in large-corpus analysis. Second, it uses these measuresto identify and characterize the lexical profile that distinguishes Andrea Camilleri within the broader landscape ofSellerio crime fiction. Starting from a set of words that consistently and robustly emerge across keyness measuresas distinctive of Camilleri, the analysis explores their role from a qualitative perspective. Particular attention isdevoted to the interaction between standard Italian, the Sicilian dialect, and Camilleri-style language in order tohighlight his distinctive linguistic traits.