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．