Evaluative clash, evaluative cohesion and how we actually read evaluation in texts

•How text producers construct evaluative cohesion (or harmony).•Examples of how evaluative cohesion is constructed using embedding and contagion.•The ways in which text producers sometimes disrupt evaluative cohesion.•The reasons why they do so are examined and categorized.

Evaluative clashes are, of course, only noticed because of the expectation that speakers will use evaluation consistently and coherently over set stretches of discourse, a process I term evaluative harmony. In this paper I first categorize types of evaluative clash and then investigate, with detailed examples, many derived from large language corpora, of how speakers and writers both construct cohesive evaluative harmony in stretches of text but also how they can sometimes exploit this harmony to surprise and engage their listeners and readers.