The oral traditional literature of all cultures is characterized by many kinds of repetition on a variety of structural levels, including, for example, repetition of metrical patterns, sounds and syntax, verbal formulas, large and small thematic units, and even entire story patterns.' Among the kinds of repetition that have long attracted scholars of Russian oral traditional literature is the repetition of prepositions, which has been studied from many different perspectives.2 One of the first to concern himself with this feature of oral literature was A. X. Vostokov, who early in the nineteenth century observed that this kind of repetition, serving to clarify the syntactic relationship between modifiers and substantives, was especially frequent in prose genres such as the chronicle and should be listed among the grammatical properties of Old Russian. In oral traditional verse Vostokov considered this type of repetition as one of the devices used to fill out the metrical line.3 Toward the end of the nineteenth century in a short article entitled Two Syntactic Peculiarities of the Russian Language, I. Kozlovskij supported Vostokov's observations that the repetition of prepositions was a feature of Old Russian, a feature which Old Church Slavonic lacked.4 Kozlovskij's research, however, led him to conclude that repetition of prepositions occurred primarily in diplomatic and legal documents. In support of this conclusion Kozlovskij gave a variety of examples from many different genres of the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries, including among them some examples from the oral poetry of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Kozlovskij stressed the fact that prepositions are repeated most frequently in those monuments which reflect the vernacular. When A. A. Potebnja turned to this problem he concluded, with Vostokov, that repetition of prepositions, particularly in early Russian literature, was a syntactic characteristic of the early language occurring with greatest frequency in Russian chronicles before the seventeenth century.5 He dismissed, however, the role of the repeated preposition in satisfying metrical requirements. Repetition of prepositions has also been noted as a feature of the language of certain fifteenth-century official documents.6