Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles

Speaker
Robert Henderson
Elin McCready
Affiliation
University of Arizona and Aoyama Gakuin University
Date
Thu January 28th 2021, 3:00 - 4:20pm

Please email bwaldon [at] stanford.edu (Brandon Waldon) for the Zoom link to this event.

A dogwhistle is a piece of language that sends one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message to an ingroup. Professors Henderson and McCready propose an analysis of dogwhistles in the setting of social meaning games that treats them as signaling the persona of the speaker, and in some circumstances enabling an enrichment of the conventional meaning of the expression. They compare this account with views in terms of conventional implicature, invited inference, and classical gricean implicature. They further show how this formal framework allows, not just a account of dogwhistles, but opens up a way to analyze a variety of sociopramgatic phenomena involving trust, reliability, ideology, standpoints, etc.