Is it possible to use animation State Machines for input management?

For instance, say I have the game running and I press pause. I would no longer want my inputs for up/down/left/right sending movement commands to the player character, but to the menu cursor. To do that, AFAIK, I'm gonna need some sort of state machine in my input controller script so that instead of firing the trigger "playerMoveLeft", it fires the trigger "cursorMoveLeft".

Is it possible to use the animation controller state machine setup as an ad-hoc controls state machine? If not, what's the standard way of controlling what triggers fire when you make inputs? Just to program each state manually in your input controller script?