Abstract
This chapter explores the evolution of evaluative language in museum communication (MC) across different formats and modalities, emphasising its role in shaping audience perceptions and engagement. Drawing on over 20 years of professional experience and research rooted in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and multimodal analysis, it examines how evaluation has been embedded in MC since its early origins. The chapter presents findings from three studies: Study 1 identifies key evaluative parameters (e.g., novelty, quality, quantity, exclusivity, and newsworthiness) in a corpus of contemporary museum press releases; Study 2 traces the diachronic development of evaluative language from 1950 to 2010, highlighting a growing emphasis on the parameters of newsworthiness; Study 3 investigates the integration of emoji in digital MC, revealing their role in amplifying interpersonal meaning, particularly within the subsystem of aesthetic appreciation. The findings highlight that MC is intrinsically evaluative and has developed over time across different modes (print and digital) and modalities (linguistic and paralinguistic). This progression has reached the contemporary era, marked by a shift towards more visually expressive methods of communication.