The study deals with the way imperative forms of Russian visual and auditory perception verbs function as discourse markers in contemporary spoken Russian. The data is drawn from the Russian National Corpus. The article focuses on the forms smotri(te) (‘look') and slushay(te) (‘listen') (both formal and intimate), but also extends to analogous forms of other verbs of seeing and hearing that can occur as discourse markers, such as vidite, slyshite, poslushayte, etc. In spoken discourse, all of them perform a metacommunicative function of attracting attention and keeping the interlocutor involved, but there are important differences concerning their position in the utterance, semantic and pragmatic features. Both smotrite and slushayte are normally placed at the beginning of a clause, which may not be the case with other markers. But while sharing the same position, their functional semantics differs quite noticeably. Smotrite is commonly used in institutional communication, whereas slushayte is more typical of