We are pleased to be able to honor Arthur J. Bronstein with this volume of essays. We are all the more pleased because the volume has consider able intrinsic merit, but neither the reader nor Arthur should have any doubts about our primary purpose in assembling this book. That the col lection is intrinsically valuable is, in itself, a tribute to the man whom it honors: The contributing authors are all colleagues, students, and friends of Arthur. Readers who are acquainted with Arthur will not be surprised by the broad range of academic expertise which has been brought to bear on the subject of language in this book. They will recognize that Arthur's own range of expertise and interest is only barely matched by the contents of the essays and the backgrounds of their authors. On the other hand, those who know little about Arthur may have thought of him primarily in narrow association with phonetics and lin guistics, most likely as the author of The Pronunciation of American English, surely the most influential of American phonetics texts during the last quarter of a century. Although such an association is in many respects appropriate, it is altogether too limited, but this will not deter us from using it as the basis for a relevant and, we hope, revealing metaphor about Arthur J.