The paper addresses lexical factors of stress shift from nouns to prepositions in the modern Russian literary language. The purpose of the study is to determine the conditions that promote or hinder accentuation of functional lexemes in live spoken speech. Scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the author for the first time conducts a comprehensive sociolinguistic study on accentuation of prepositional phrases “preposition + noun” and compares codified and usual norms of accentuation of these phrases. As a result of the research, the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors that affect stress shift have been determined and described in detail and trends in the development of the considered norms have been identified.