历史语用学尽管已有较长的研究历史，但真正成为语用学的一个相对成熟的分支学科还是本世纪初的事。本文在阐释历史语用学的学科性质后，重点呈现该学科现有的方法体系，并对具体方法的难点和局限加以反思，从而提出相应的解决办法: ( 1) 选择具有交际功能的文本，关注文本的典型性，克服语篇分析挑选文本的难题。( 2) 选择文体语料库和可靠权威的语料库，重塑语境，考量功能与形式的对应是否完整和全面，保证语用解读的可靠性，超越语料库脱离语境和单纯从形式出发的局限。

Though historical pragmatics has been studied for nearly 30 years，this field only comes to its thriving stage in the early 21st century． After illustrating its disciplinary features，this research constructs its methodological system，points out the limitations in specific methods and provides a way out: when employing literary method，one should choose texts of communicative function and prove the representativeness of a text; when using corpus，one should choose a genre-based and authoritative corpus， reconstruct the context and guarantee the correspondence between form and function．