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.