This paper examines the use and distribution of kunyang as a discourse marker in conversational Korean. A corpus of 58000 words constructed out of the Sejong Corpus was searched for the tokens of kunyang, and the meaning and function of each of the instances of kunyang were analyzed in light of the context it appeared in. A total of 231 tokens of kunyang were found, of which 50(21.6%) were adverbs and 171 discourse markers, with 10 unidentifiable ones. The functions of kunyang as a discourse marker include a mitigator, connective, emphasizer, filler, and hedge. The mitigator function, also evidenced in some adverbs and connectives, may have derived from the original meaning of kunyang, and conveys a speaker`s intention to minimize the importance of some particular event, situation or process, possibly employed as a politeness strategy. Analyses of kunyang in more diverse contexts and with aural data are needed to obtain a complete picture of its function and distribution as a discourse marker.