‘PLANES ARE BIRDS’ Metaphor
203language vocabulary items, mainly nouns and noun-phrases, which can be
treated as belonging to the language of aviation.
Aviation vocabulary
According to Grucza (2014: 98-100), research on any LSP should begin
with the analysis of specialist texts. Here, a cursory examination was
carried out of texts that can intuitively be qualified as aviation related, i.e.
course books intended for the education of pilots and airport staff, aviation
textbooks, aviation periodicals, service manuals, manufacturers’
documents/brochures, as well as air travel brochures, scientific articles
dealing with aspects of aircraft design. All of these texts served as
background sources for the analysis proper, that is the search for traces of
the metaphor PLANES ARE BIRDS in aviation vocabulary. This
preliminary analysis of texts indicated that, irrespective of the national
language on which the given aviation LSP is based, a distinction needs to
be drawn between at least three subgroups of aviation vocabulary.
The first subgroup of vocabulary items belonging to aviation LSP
includes words used only by professionals in aviation and aeronautics,^2 i.e.
pilots, air traffic controllers, aviation engineers, aircraft maintenance
technicians, scientists, manufacturers of planes. Importantly, all of the
words assigned to this group are not known to, and not understood by,
laypeople. These lexical items usually refer to pieces of equipment,
activities, actions, as well as other strictly technical phenomena, hence,
being irrelevant to everyday contexts. They appear in official,
predominantly written, texts such as: technical documents, literature
devoted to technical issues or advertising texts addressed at specialists in
aviation/aeronautics. The compound high-lift device meaning ‘any
component used to increase the lift produced by an aircraft wing,’ or
canard ‘a horizontal control surface mounted ahead of the main wing to
provide longitudinal stability and control’ are but two of numerous
vocabulary items which can be assigned to this subgroup of aviation
vocabulary. Importantly, this subgroup includes a number of terms sensu
stricto, that is terms which are monosemous within the given discipline,
which have a precisely defined range of denotation, and, being devoid of
any emotional load, are stylistically neutral (Lukszyn and Zmarzer 2006).
(^2) In LGP English, the lexeme aviation is defined as ‘aerial navigation by means of
an aeroplane, flying; the science of powered flight’ (OED). In turn, in specialized
sources the denotation of the term aviation is narrower; aviation means ‘the
operation of heavier-than-air craft,’ whereas ‘the science or art of flight and the
science of operating aircrafts’ is referred to as aeronautics.