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The unabashed typologist: A Frans Plank Schubertiade
It is a great pleasure to offer the present volume of some of the best papers of our dear friend and colleague Frans Plank, in commemoration of the 21 years he has served as founding editor of our journal, Linguistic Typology. When Uri Tadmor originally brought up the idea of a celebratory volume, we immediately contacted a number of leading scholars, colleagues, and friends of Frans, who we knew would rush to honor him and recognize the extensive contributions he has made to field in so many ways. Although we did briefly consider soliciting original papers to honor him, we then imagined how Frans would evaluate them in order to earn his own imprimatur: “accept with minor revisions”, “accept with major revisions”, “not in the remit of this volume” etc. We realized that what we really wanted to do was to assemble—and reread—Frans’s own great work which has so inspired the four of us and countless others. We added to this the decision to invite colleagues who have interacted with him in the typological sphere to submit their own statements of appreciation for the scholar and the person. We were delighted to receive the 20 contributions that precede the six articles we chose which reflect some of his best work, all of it sanctioned by the supportive De Gruyter Mouton Publishers. The outpouring of thoughtful and personal testimonials we received cover such a wide range of recognizable reactions and citations of Frans’s scholarship, historical knowledge, intellectual leadership, humor, and lovable quirkiness that we feel it necessary to plagiarize and cite from these letters in this brief preface to the volume.