This book explores the efforts of educational reformers who sought to link secondary and higher education in the decades after 1870. Through various state, regional, and national initiatives, these reformers created a hierarchical system, laid the foundation for a growing standardization in education, and influenced who would have access to college.

The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization.

This book is intended to provide ''a comprehensive and comparative introduction to the standardization processes of the Germanic languages''; it thus presents an exercise in ''comparative standardology'' (p. 1). The editors of the present volume, Ana Deumert (Monash University, Melbourne) and Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/FWO-Vlaanderen), have brought together sixteen contributions on Germanic languages written by authoritative scholars.