Frans van Coetsem, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Cornell University, prolific scholar, and esteemed teacher and colleague, died at his home in Ithaca, New York, on February 11, 2002. Over the course of his long professional career, Van Coetsem made numerous important and lasting contributions to Germanic linguistics and general linguistics and did so both directly through his own research and indirectly through the generous and inspiring mentoring he gave to his students.In writing this piece I have drawn in a number of places on a coauthored obituary to appear in the spring of 2003 in the Memorial Statements of the Faculty, 2001–2002, Cornell University; the authors of that statement are Anthony Buccini, James Gair, Wayne Harbert, and John Wolff. I have also included some facts that I learned from the obituary by Frans's close friend, Odo Leys, which appeared in Leuvense Bijdragen 91.1–2 (2002); the brief quote of Leys is also from that article.