Go home (6 Jan 2021)

The imperative go home represents a prominent part of a video message sent to the armed assaulters on Capitol Hill by the then-President of the United States on 6 January 2021 via Twitter. The paper aims to investigate to what extent this expression can be read as an ambiguous dog-whistle, and how an additional interpretation beyond the conventional meaning ‘return to your private homes’ can be justified. It is precisely the hidden nature of the potential additional message that illustrates a general issue of ambiguity research and pragmatics, i.e., the question of how plausible utterance meanings can be identified. To approach these questions, the paper focuses on the general communicative setting, prior communication between Trump and his supporters, and on linguistic features of the message (personal reference and semantic frames). Different types of interpretative openness are discussed to refine the analyses, and a broad approach to ambiguity is adopted that includes interpretations that are not (yet) conventionalised. The final part of the paper argues that the simultaneous orientation to multiple addressee groups represents a key feature of Trump’s message, which is reflected by a coexistence of different speaker instances. Comparing the example to classical examples of dog whistles, it will be classified as an accomplice whistle. The case study highlights the importance of multiple addressing in media-based communication, and the potential of linking ambiguity research and multiple addressing, considering different addressee groups with potentially strongly diverging backgrounds, interests, and modalities of interpretation.