Abstract: Cognitive linguistics in the 21st century is focused more on how specific cultural models and cognitive resources illustrate conceptual structure, meaning construction and its mechanism, resulting in two new branches of cognitive linguistics: cognitive sociolinguistics and historical cognitive linguistics, the latter of which combines the basic theory of cognitive linguistics and the research paradigm of historical linguistics, seeking to construct a new research paradigm in which language is viewed as a complex adaptive system (CAS). This has inspired the rise of a new research paradigm in cognitive linguistics, indicating the trend of linguistic research in the direction of natural sciences. This new paradigm will push cognitive linguistics towards a broader space for development. This paper begins with a brief introduction of historical cognitive linguistics as an emerging discipline, then elucidates its major research paradigm CAS, its main research topics and methodology, and finally concludes by exploring the prospects for future research of historical cognitive linguistics.