By “pragmatic markers” we mean discourse units (words and multiword expressions) with a weakened referential meaning, which perform a variety of pragmatic or procedural speaker’s tasks. The paper aims at the development of approaches to systematize and describe the inventory of pragmatic markers in a wide scale way, based on comprehensive corpus data. The theoretical and methodological basis for the corpus study of pragmatic markers in Russian is introduced. The provisional version of pragmatic markers classification is proposed. The description of pragmatic markers will be carried out on the material of representative corpora of Russian dialogic and monologic speech.