Studies about "discourse markers" have coincided in stressing their importance to the production and comprehension ofdiscourse, both oral and written, in different languages. Despite their importance, one ofthe less investigated dimensions in the Spanish language is the social and dialectal variation in the use ofthe aforementioned particles. Thus, the majority ofthe approaches to the discursive functions ofthe markers have a tendency to be based on peninsular Spanish and on reconstructed examples or on written language. In this study, the pragmatic functioning and sociolinguistic stratification oftwo markers used in the Spanish spoken in Santiago, Chile are analyzed: por ser and onda. The objectives ofthis article are to identify the functions said discourse markers fulfll and to correlate their use frequency with the sex, age, and level ofeducation sociodemographic variables. For this purpose, the behavior ofthese particles in the interviews that make up the sociolinguistic corpus ofthe PRESEEA of Santiago will be analyzed.