Communicative Functions of Eye Closing Behaviours

In this work we present a typology of eye closing behaviours based on a semantic taxonomy of communicative signals. The types of eye closing we investigate are blinks, eye-closures and winks performed during political debates. While other studies in the literature attempt to classify blinks and eye-closures according to their duration or (in)completeness of the closure, our study aims to distinguish between communicative and non communicative types of eye closing, and among the former category, between different meanings possibly conveyed by closing one’s eyes. Our goal is to prove that while winks are always communicative, i.e. they bear a meaning, also blinks and eye-closure may have a communicative value. To the analysis of eye closing types we applied both an observational and a Speaker’s judgement approach and classified them on the basis of a semantic taxonomy according to which each communicative signal can convey information on the World, on the Sender’s mind and on the Sender’s Identity.