Mr, Mrs, Ms... or Mx? A new approach to honorifics.

A paper that deals with the gender-neutral honorific 'Mx'.

People are becoming increasingly aware of trans* people and also their struggles, e.g. addressing them correctly.

First, the necessary terms such as 'term of address' but also 'sex' and 'gender' (and thus 'transgender') have to be defined/explained. Sam Killerman's 'Genderbread Person' is used for a non-traditional, more detailled approach to the notion of sex and gender. Secondly, Roger Brown's and Albert Gilman's 'pronouns of power and solidarity' will be adapted and applied to 'Mx'. Lastly, a survey that was carried out for this paper will be illustrated. It deals with questions such as whether people are aware that this gender-neutral term of address exists and what they think of it.

This is a paper for a seminar called 'Cognitive pragmatics' at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany). It was graded with an A+/1,0.