Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
CAR
“car”
How to make it
Hold two fists like a steering wheel and turn it back and forth.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Steering. Made larger, it is DRIVE — another noun-verb pair distinguished by movement size.
Sources
- ASL-LEX (iconicity)Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova, Naomi Caselli, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, and Karen Emmorey. "The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 26, no. 2 (2021): 263–277. link
- Supalla & Newport 1978Supalla, Ted, and Elissa Newport. "How Many Seats in a Chair? The Derivation of Nouns and Verbs in American Sign Language." In Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, edited by Patricia Siple, 91–132. Academic Press, 1978.
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Location
Neutral space
Made at the neutral space.
Movement
up and down
Both hands move together.
Repeated. Palm facing in.