How dogwhistles work

Abstract

The paper focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of dogwhistles, namely expressions that send one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message to an ingroup. There are three questions that need to be resolved to understand the semantics and pragmatics of the phenomenon at hand: (i) What kind of meaning is dogwhistle content—implicature, conventional implicature, etc.; (ii) how do (some but not all) hearers recover the dogwhistle content, and (iii) how do expressions become endowed with dogwhistle content? These three questions are interrelated, but previous analyses have emphasized answers to a subset of these questions in ways that provide unsatisfactory answers to the others. The goal for this paper is to take stock of existing accounts, while showing a way forward that reconciles their differences.