Eye behavior in Russian spoken interaction and its correlation with affirmation and negation

The paper describes the most commonly recurring traits of eye behavior in Russian dialogue and their connection with the Russian words Da ‘yes’ and Net ‘no,’ which are the main modes of expressing affirmation and negation in Russian. The eye behavior is analyzed from three main points of view: (1) gaze grammar, (2) eye closing, (3) blinking. The author arrives at the conclusion that (1) Da ‘yes’ and Net ‘no’ are connected to a specific gaze pattern, (2) both are combined with eye closing as a special (embedded) gesture, and (3) they form the basis on which the usage of blinking as punctuation marks and as accent diacritics is founded. The research has been conducted using data from the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO) and selected examples from natural interactions.