Invited presentation at the 2017 DGfS workshop on secondary information. Then appeared as a chapter in 2019 in the volume Secondary Content. With Elin McCready
A dogwhistle is 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. Stanley (2015) argues that dog-whistle language like involves a non-at-issue component. We argue against a CI account of dogwhistles and instead propose alternative, purely pragmatic account combining aspects of McCready 2012, Burnett 2016; Burnett 2017, and which we think better accounts for the core their core properties. In broad strokes, we make the novel proposal that dogwhistles come in two types. The first concerns covert signals that the speaker has a certain persona, which we model by extending the Sociolinguistic Signalling Games of Burnett 2016; Burnett 2017. The second involves sending a message with an enriched meaning whose recovery is contingent on recognizing the speaker's covertly signalled persona.