1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述）

magazine, as a widely-spread medium, is amirror of the society. it records the political events and international affairin the most direct and convenient way. the language of magazine preciselydemonstrates the authentic use of language in the modern society.

the advancement of the belt and roadinitiative of chinese government has reinforced the international communicationwith other countries. with the rapid development of globalization, theinformation concerning china’s policy has exerted great influence over theworld. the economist, famous for its poignant economic and political news,attracts people's attention as a matter of course. the political news reportageon the belt and road initiative has begun to arouse more and more concerns fromits readership.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

the present thesis is an attempt toinvestigate the stylistic features of the economist political news on the beltand road initiative on the basis of the multidimensional (md) analysis proposedby biber. this study is based upon the economist political news (tepn) corpus,which consists of five articles related to the belt and road initiativepublished from may to august in 2015, with a running word of 84701. the othercorpus coca (corpus of contemporary american english) is employed to make acomparison to find differences of their stylistic features. the coca corpuscontains sample data on magazine from 2008 to 2012 downloaded from the websiteof coca. the multidimensional analysis tagger (mat) developed by nini (2014) isto be used to extract and tag the target features. this software tool is usedfor automatic extraction of the target lexico-grammatical features on a windowssystem. the software can process a number of plain text files at the same time,extracting and tagging the linguistic features that replicate the features usedin biber’s md analysis.

the multidimensional (md) analysis is anapproach developed by biber (1988) which has the basic premise that it ispossible to identify register differences between different types of languageby the assemblage and analysis of a large number of textual features which thencan then be ascribed to certain dimensions. the md analysis uses computers tocount the frequencies of linguistic features in tagged corpora, and then to carryout a factor analysis on these feature counts in order to identify‘dimensions’, that is, sets of meaningful associations among individualvariables.

3. 研究计划与安排

before 1st january : settlement of the title

before 1stmarch: submission of the outline

before 15thapril : submission of the first draft

4. 参考文献（12篇以上）

[1] biber, d. variationacross speech and writing[m]. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1988.

[2] cao, y. amp; xiao, r. a multi-dimensional contrastivestudy of english abstracts by native and non-native writers[j]. corpora, 2013, 8(2): 209-234.

[3] conrad, s. expanding multi-dimensional analysis withqualitative research: a case study from civil engineering[a]. sardinha, t. b. amp; pinto, m. v. multi-dimensional analysis, 25 years on: a tribute to douglas biber[m].netherlands: john benjamins, 2014:273–295.