We are pleased to assemble this volume in honor of Dr. Rudolph C. Troike, in celebration of his long and distinguished career. As a researcher, administrator, teacher, and mentor, Rudy has dedicated his life to linguistics and language, and through his scholarly contributions, teaching and personal generosity in many ways, he has touched the lives of many people across national boundaries and in several academic disciplines. In this volume some of his students and colleagues have joined together to celebrate his achievements. It is a great honor to dedicate this volume to him.

This volume first grew out of an all-day workshop to celebrate Rudy’s 50 years career in university teaching. The workshop, affectionately titled “Rudy Fest”, was held at Harvard University, on May 21, 2010, as a special panel of the joint conference of the 18th International Association of Chinese Linguistics and the 22nd North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics. There were 14 papers presented at the workshop, by Rudy’s students and colleagues. The contributors include four generations of Rudy’s students—Jim Huang, Chiu-yu Tseng, Samuel H. Wang representing the first generation students that Rudy taught in Taiwan; Francesca del Gobbo, Yang Gu, C.-S. Luther Liu, W.-T. Dylan Tsai as the second generation students (themselves having studied with Jim Huang); Barry Yang and C.-M. Louis Liu as the third-generation students (having studied with Dylan Tsai); and Na Liu representing the fourth generation students, as she had studied with Gang Gu, who in turn finished his Ph.D. degree with Yang Gu. All of the papers presented were concerned with Chinese linguistics. Other papers presented include those by Feng-hsi Liu, a colleague of Rudy’s at the University of Arizona, Ning Yu and Yi Xu, both of whom received their Ph.D. training at the University of Arizona, and Cher Leng Lee, with Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. In addition, the volume also includes seven papers that were not presented at the workshop. Six of the papers were contributed by graduates of the University of Arizona, and they touch on issues on second language acquisition, syntax, and language variation, with data from Korean, Spanish, Quechua and Chinese: Ellen Courtney, Hang Du, Paola Dussias, Kimberly Geeslin, Min-Joo Kim, and Enchao Shi. All together, these papers represent the immense influence Rudy has had on research in linguistics and language study. We are also glad to receive a contribution from Professor C.-C. Cheng, who became a close colleague of Rudy and his wife, Professor Muriel Saville-Troike, during their years of service at Urbana-Champaign.

There are many others that we could have invited to the 2010 Workshop at Harvard, or to contribute to this volume. But space and time considerations have forced us to make somewhat arbitrary choices.

While the papers collected in this volume have been included by invitation, each paper has been reviewed by two reviewers as well as by the editors. We are indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose criticisms, constructive comments, and suggestions have helped improve the content and style of each paper. We would also like to thank C.-C. Jane Tang and Elizabeth Zeitoun for their support and guidance, in their capacities as Editor and (former) Executive Editor of the Language and Linguistics Book Series, and for the help we received from them and Ms. Chun-yu Kuo of the Language and Linguistics Editorial Office, in bringing this volume to fruition.

A final word about the title of this volume: Peaches and Plums. We have picked this title in consultation with Dr. Troike, based on the Chinese saying “Tao li man tianxia” (literally, “Peaches and plums filling the world”, in affectionate reference to a teacher whose early sown seeds have borne fruits that cover the gardens of education and learning. Although Rudy himself humbly talked about a small ripple in reference to the article contributed by Chiu-Yu Tseng, we have seen how some ripples have generated waves, and waves generated tides and beyond.