The Real Professor(s) Higgins: An Overview of British and American Scholars

The present book offers a brief historical overview of the main scholars, hence the real Professors Higgins1, who played an important role in the development and study of the pronunciation of the English language. In terms of content, this work is divided into four main parts: the first Section, Professor Henry Higgins, briefly introduces the character whose name inspired the title of the present book, namely, the famous Professor of Phonetics who was created by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw for his Pygmalion (1912), who also inspired the movies Pygmalion (1938) and My Fair Lady (1964), inter alia2. The second and third Sections, instead, illustrate some of the most important real (i.e. not fictional) scholars who, like the fictional Mr. Higgins, were interested in the sounds of the English language and largely contributed to the development of the discipline. More specifically, the second Section, The Pioneers, after offering a brief and more general introduction to the origins of the study of language sounds, focuses on the pioneers of the field, whereas the third, XXI Century Scholars, concentrates on two important linguists who played an important role in our century. Finally, the fourth Section, Playing Mr. Higgins, has been conceived as an opportunity for students to learn how to analyze sounds, as Mr. Higgins did, through modern software programs used in acoustic phonetics such as Praat, which Mr. Higgins did not have.