1. Introduction 1.1. State of the Art “E CONOMICS IS everywhere. Law, management, politics, personal relations—we draw from it all.” 1 These half-warning, half-advertising sentences are bor- rowed from a practical handbook on economics authored by two of the most popular economists of our time. Perhaps they are true and perhaps economics truly is everywhere. Certainly, however, not everybody agrees that this is the case; or, at any rate, not at all times. Even when they encounter financial difficulties, most people relate to them in terms of “tight corners” or “rashness” rather than “economics.” Nevertheless, there are times when economics is felt as intervening at its most bru- tal in people’s private lives. In such cases, “tight corners” are seen as a direct consequence of economics and specialists tend to describe them by using words such as “crisis,” “depres- sion” and “recession.” It is in such situations that not only common people, but also the representatives of other fields of study strive to understand optimally the mysterious, yet omnipotent mechanism that economics is. This phenomenon is also witnessed in linguistics—specifically, in the linguistic approach- es centered on economic and financial discourses. In fact, since its establishment as a science, linguistics has been in close contact with economics, as “[Ferdinand de] Saussure’s Discourses of Economic Crisis in Romanian Media An Automated Analysis Using the ReaderBench Framework S IMINA -M ARIA T ERIAN , T EODOR M IHAI C OTE Þ , M ARIA -D ORINELA S ÎRBU , M IHAI D ASCÃLU , ª TEFAN T RÃU ª AN -M ATU This work was supported by the following research grants: 1) INTELLIT, project number PN- III-P1-1.2-PCCDI-2017-0821, funded by the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS–UEFISCDI, within PNCDI III; 2) the project LBUS-IRG-2018-04, financed from the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu research grants; 3) the README project “Interactive and Innovative Application for Evaluating the Readability of Texts in Romanian Language and for Improving Users’ Writing Styles,” contract no. 114/15.09.2017, MySMIS 2014 code 119286.