From a formal point of view there are three types of eye gaze behaviour:
Besides lexically determined eye gaze behaviour, we need to distinguish five different functional categories, based on a distinction between two types or two levels of signing depending on who the signer's locus represents: the signer as sender of the current utterance (i.e. the sender level) or one of the individuals talked about (i.e. the character level). The five functional categories of eye gaze behaviour in monologues in Danish Sign Language are:
(1) "One day when I had finished work, I went home and as I was walking along, I saw something that made me wonder." Movie (Size 576K)
rot.fsl
+ V fsl V+ V
ONE DAY 1.p WORK FINISH /1.p HOME WALK[+] /
rot.fl---------------
flu V+
1.p WATCH HOW-STRANGE /
The signer blinks at all major syntactic boundaries (V indicates eye blink). In monologues signers avoid eyecontact at major syntactic boundaries either by blinking or by looking away in some non-significant direction or, in some cases, they only change their gaze direction as a consequence of changing between a locus direction and eyecontact.
When the signer signs FINISH in (1), she looks to the left and also rotates her head so that she faces this direction. Both can be seen as imitating her paying attention to her work. Her looking in the forward-left direction while signing WATCH HOW-STRANGE imitates her own gaze direction at the time when she was walking home from work and saw something that made her wonder.
The sign HOW-STRANGE is one of a group of signs that denote people's emotional reactions. They can occur with a preceding nominal or pronoun, but never with any sign following within the same clause. But HOW-STRANGE must be accompanied with a look in the direction of the locus used to represent the item that causes the emotional reaction. Signers may also imitate a person in deep thoughts, in which case the direction in which they look is not significant. Imitative eye gaze further includes eye gaze directed towards an imaginary receiver in constructed dialogue.
In (1) the eye gaze behaviour imitates the eye gaze of the agent or experiencer referent (the topics of FINISH, WATCH, HOW-STRANGE). But eye gaze behaviour may also imitate what can best be described as an experiencer or patient referent in relation to the verb.
(2) "My American father said to me, 'Why don't you sign up for volleyball.'" Movie (Size 576K)
V+ fr + V+
1.p AMERICA FATHER DET+fr/ NOTIFY+1.p WHY NOT
DET+m VOLLEYBALL /
The signer establishes a referent in the discourse universe by means of the nominal consisting of the four first signs accompanied by eyecontact with the receiver. Then she looks very briefly in the forward-right direction before the start of the predicate NOTIFY and the quotation, ‘Why don’t you sign up for volleyball’. Signers also often look briefly in the direction of a referent’s locus before or simultaneously with a topical nominal at the beginning of the sentence or a resumptive pronoun at the end of the sentence.
This type of eye gaze behaviour is not imitative of a character in the discourse. It is directed towards the locus of the agent of NOTIFY, not in the direction of the recipient of the quotation. The eye gaze behaviour is the sender’s way of indicating the topic of the verb and helping the receiver keep track of the referents. Very often we see a pronoun in the same position.
(3) "(The water) was streaming down (into the bathroom)... (The wallpaper) came off in many places." Movie (Size 1M)
config. +
Liquid-Pm+(up+move-line+alternating+downward) /
Liquid-Pm+(up+move-line+alternating+downward)
...
config. + config.
Flat-entity-Pm+(move+alternating+inward+up) /
Flat-entity-Pm+(move+alternating+inward+up)
The signer looks in the direction of the imagined configuration of referents, the pattern made by the streaming water and the wallpaper. In cases of configurational eye gaze signers may look at their hands, but they may also - as in this case - look beyond their hands to an imagined pattern in the air.
Bahan and Supalla (1995) describe three types of eye gaze behaviour corresponding to my categories
1: sender's eyecontact with the receiver ('gaze to audience'),
4: imitative eye gaze ('character's gaze'), and
5: configurational eye gaze ('gaze at hands').
They have no category corresponding to the sender’s reference-tracking eye gaze. But this type has been described for ASL by Baker (1976:29).
The distinction between the sender level and the character level may explain the fact that there is a tendency - but only a tendency - for signers to look away in no particular direction when referring to themselves as a character rather than as the sender of the current utterance (cf. Metzger 1998:174-176). A signer was asked what sorts of sports she did during a one-year stay in the U.S.A. She signed:
(4) "Before going I really didn't like volleyball." Movie (Size 384K)
+
EARLIER 1.p DETEST VOLLEYBALL 1.p THROW-AWAY /
with eyecontact all the way through. The time expression EARLIER indicates that she is talking about herself at some other moment in time, but from the point of view of the present. After the sentence in (7) she goes on to signing example (2) ("My American father said to me, 'Why don’t you sign up for volleyball.'") and then her reaction to the question:
(5) "I thought, 'How awful'." Movie (Size 256K)
-
1.p THINK DETEST /
Here she has broken off eyecontact with the receiver while so to speak reenacting her reaction.
What is the justification for distinguishing reference-tracking eye gaze from configurational eye gaze? They share the function of drawing attention to referents. But the typical reference-tracking eye gaze is in the direction of a locus, it is very brief and occurs with a topical nominal, a resumptive pronoun, or just before predicates signalling the predicate’s topic. Configurational eye gaze, by contrast, is in the direction of an imagined configuration, not just a single locus, or in the direction of the hand or hands as expressing a polymorphemic predicate and it seems to be of longer duration than reference-tracking eye gaze.
What then about imitative eye gaze and configurational eye gaze? Imitative eye gaze need not be in the direction of any locus representing one or more referents. Moreover, imitative eye gaze may occur with a topical nominal such as the first person pronoun in example (5). By contrast, configurational eyegaze is always in a specific direction, i.e. the imagined configuration or the hand(s), and it only occurs with predicates.
Three levels of interpretation in the notations depending on the purpose of the notation:
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