The article considers a group of contact verbs (CV) ( znaesh / te , vidish / te , ponimaesh / te , (po)slushay / te , (po)smotri / te , predstav / te and so on) as a type of pragmatic markers in Russian oral speech. Based on the Russian everyday speech corpus “One Speaker’s Day”,we compiled a user subcorpus of CV listing 2105 uses of such verb forms.All the sub-corpus entries have been analyzed from the semantic, grammatical, and functional (pragmatic) perspective. Semantically, all CVs belong to the group of intellectual activity verbs ( verbs of perception, and verbs of understanding ),with the verb videt ‘see’ falling into both semantic classes at once. Grammatically, CVs also can be divided into two groups: 2 sg/pl forms, and imperatives. Interestingly, it is only imperatives that can function as CVs in both the perfective (pfv) and the imperfective (ipfv) aspects. The grammatical perspective also shows one exception: the verb predstavit / predstavlat [imagine.pfv/ipfv] falls into the group of imperatives ( predstav / te ) in the pfv form, while in the ipfv form (predstavlaesh/te), it belongs to the same group with the verbs znaesh/te ‘know.sg/pl’, vidish/te ‘see.sg/pl’, ponimaesh/te ‘understand.sg/pl’, etc. Our pragmatic analysis helps identify all the additional functions CVs have in oral speech apart from their main, metacommunicative function. As all the CVs considered in the paper, like other Russian pragmatemes, are very actively used in oral speech and normally show structural variability and multifunctionality,they can become part of the glossary of a special “Dictionary of Pragmatic Markers of Colloquial Russian”.