When discussing politics, politicians use trigger words to insinuate a specific meaning or topic. Ex. urban-blacks, middle eastern-muslim... Are there any specific theories that focuses on (or how words are used for) propaganda, fear mongering, connotations or how words become attached to definitions other than their literal ones?
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1I think a common term for what you're describing is 'dog whistle'; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics– Jeremy NeedleCommented Dec 9, 2018 at 8:02
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This isn't an answer, but it's worth noting that many linguists whose work doesn't come anywhere near things like the pragmatics of propaganda regularly discuss them in, e.g., their blogs. But these discussions tend to be nontechnical (and, when technicality is necessary, as theory-neutral as possible). For example, Chomsky's spoken a great deal about the connections between marketing and propaganda, but there's very little connection to theoretical linguistics—he assumes you know more about, say, post-Stalin socialist theory than about generative-grammar linguistic theory.– abarnertCommented Jan 13, 2019 at 19:24
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1 Answer
I don't know about historical linguistics, but from a NLP standpoint, determining the semantics of words falls under the subfield of pragmatics.
Of particular interest in your case is implicature, "the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else". For example: saying "maybe" when you mean "no", or asking "Can you do this?" when you mean the directive "Do this." Grice's Maxims outline an approach to cooperative conversation, but these maxims are often violated or flouted for the purpose of misdirection, irony, sarcasm, or more generally "extra meaning".
