Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
CHAIR
“chair”
Tap the two fingers of an 'H' hand twice across the fingers of your other 'H' hand.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The noun derived from SIT. Supalla and Newport showed that ASL makes nouns from related verbs by repeating a smaller version of the movement — SIT becomes CHAIR, the way FLY becomes AIRPLANE.
- 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.
Made at the weak hand.
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Repeated. Palm facing down.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from CHAIR in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.