The onomasiological approach (from function to form) to the study of the acquisition of discourse markers in L2 proposed here takes discursive functions as a starting point and analyses which strategies are employed by the learners to convey those functions. In this paper this theoretical approach is briefly presented and illustrated with some metadiscursive functions found in a corpus of Spanish speakers of L2 Italian and a corpus of L1 Italian speakers. Its main advantage is that it offers a complex picture of the acquisitional process that goes beyond lexical acquisition of these units and allows for a global understanding of the dynamics of learner varieties.