The Two Cinderellas: Prospection and Evaluative Cohesion. From Discourse Organisation to Corpora and Back Again

Evaluative cohesion is the long-overlooked counterpart to propositional cohesion in discourse. While the latter has been extensively theorised within systemic-functional and text-linguistic traditions, the former remains comparatively under-described, despite its central role in how texts are interpreted and experienced. This paper argues that evaluative cohesion is intrinsically linked to a further, almost equally under-theorised dimension of discourse organisation: Sinclairian prospection, or the forward-oriented projection of expectations. Discourse unfolds principally through the continuous anticipation of what is to come. And these expectations are not neutral: they are evaluatively charged. The central claim advanced here is that texts must cohere not only propositionally but evaluatively, and prospection is the principal temporal (speech) / spatial (writing) mechanism through which evaluative cohesion is established and maintained. A series of examples - from poetry, political discourse and even popular song - illustrate how expectations are built, maintained, and sometimes deliberately disrupted for effect. I will then briefly show how corpus evidence allows us to move beyond individual texts to recurring patterns and, finally, suggest that what we are dealing with here is not a marginal phenomenon, but a central organising principle of discourse — one that, interestingly, is now being operationalised at scale by Large Language Models.