‘PLANES ARE BIRDS’ Metaphor
205removed from the core. Finally, words used in communication between
specialists and non-specialists, as well as among non-specialists, i.e. words
in the third group above, lie at the peripheries of the category AVIATION
LSP. This fully agrees with Wille (2014: 13) who observes that
communication between highly skilled specialists occupies the centre of
the category of specialist languages while the part o fit applied in
communications with lay participants belongs to its periphery.^3
Importantly, metaphorically-based lexical items can, at least
theoretically, be detected in all three groups of aviation vocabulary listed
above. Reference to these groups of words will be made in the following
section.
PLANES ARE BIRDS metaphor
One of the primary notions in cognitive linguistics is the notion of a
conceptual metaphor, defined as a certain pattern of human reasoning in
which one conceptual domain (source domain) serves as a basis for the
understanding of elements of another conceptual domain (target domain).
The term conceptual domain is used with reference to any coherent
organization of experience. Importantly, conceptual metaphors rely on
mappings, i.e. a set of correspondences resulting from certain perceived
similarities between the elements of a target and a source domain
(Kऺvecses 2010: 4-10).
For the purpose of this analysis it was initially assumed that since the
idea for the creation of a flying machine came from the observation and
subsequent imitation of birds, it would be only natural for humans to think
of planes in terms of birds. In fact, the constructors of early flying
machines tried to imitate the shape of birds, and airplanes, to a varying
extent, visually resemble the shape of birds’ bodies.^4 In other words, it was
presumed that the conceptual metaphor PLANES (target domain) ARE
BIRDS (source domain) does exist. Nevertheless, verification of such an
assumption is possible only on the basis of a careful analysis of relevant
metaphorical linguistic expressions, i.e. lexical units which point to the
existence of a given conceptual metaphor. To be more precise,
(^3) In a similar vein, Kalverkämper (1990: 112) claims that the speciality of a text is
a scalar notion. The speciality of a text seems to be directly connected with the
quantity of highly specialized vocabulary items, that is words assigned in this
paper to the first subgroup.
(^4) Interestingly, since the most salient body part employed in lifting the bird from
the ground are wings being moved up and down, the first flying constructions had
moveable wings.