‘PLANES ARE BIRDS’ Metaphor
211words used by highly specialized professionals in official communication
connected with the area of their specialization, words being
incomprehensible by non-professionals. This can, at least partly, be
attributed to the fact that a number of lexemes in this group are a product
of word-manufacturing rather than pure word-formation processes, and
scientists or engineers make a conscious effort to avoid metaphorical
associations in strictly technical words.
In turn, in terms of quantity, the second subgroup of aviation lexemes,
that is vocabulary items used by professionals in less formal situations –
aviation slang, seems to be most abundant in metaphorical expressions
originating in the domain BIRDS. The lexemes bird farm, meaning
“aircraft carrier,” and cuckoo, being a reference to “a dive bomber,” serve
as two of numerous examples. What is more, a number of airplanes are, in
addition to their official names, nicknamed after birds. It is vital to note
here that numerous slang expressions can be considered not only
metaphorical, but also figurative, as they are secondary terms functioning
alongside a more official LSP term for naming a given entity (cf.
Dobrovols’kij and Piirainen 2005: 18).^10 This observation merely confirms
the well-known fact that any slang is a highly expressive variety of
language, and metaphorical expressions are frequently employed to
increase the expressive value of communication.
In the third, peripheral group of aviation vocabulary, i.e. within
lexemes used by both professionals in professional communication, as
well as by laypeople in everyday communication, some traces of the
conceptual metaphor PLANES ARE BIRDS were detected; in terms of
number, though, in the third group there were many fewer lexemes
motivated by this metaphor than in the second group. What is more,
examples of figurative metaphors were scarce. Figurative metaphor was
observed only in the case of the lexeme bird meaning “an airplane,” used
in informal situations among specialists and non-specialists, as well as in
some compound names given to planes. Some lexemes in the third group
of aviation vocabulary can, using the term propagated by Piirainen and
Dobrovols’kij (2005), be considered examples of non-figurative
metaphors. According to these authors, non-figurative metaphors are
lexical items for which there is no more direct or cognitively simple
(^10) Piirainen and Dobrovols’kij (2005) distinguish between figurative and non-
figurative metaphors. According to these authors, only those lexemes which fulfill
the double naming criterion can be considered figurative, whereas non-figurative
metaphors are lexical items for which there is no more direct or cognitively simple
expression denoting approximately the same entity (Piirainen and Dobrovols’kij
2005: 18).