Abstract: A sampled survey of the publications in the domestic and international pragmatics field in the last decade reveals that the corpus-based approach，while recognized as one of the three major approaches used in modern linguistic research，seems significantly underused in domestic pragmatic research． This inadequacy is，to some extent，ascribable to the nature of domestic pragmatic topics and units of analysis in China． To promote domestic use of corpus-based pragmatic research，more attention should be paid to language per se，dwelling on its pragmatic properties． In addition，unlike domestic corpus-based pragmatic studies，which are almost exclusively concerned with the L2 use of pragmatic markers，the counterparts abroad also deal with such issues as new words and their meanings，humor，deixis，intonation of speech acts，metaphor and metonymy，and so on． This finding provides significant reference for future pragmatic research in China．