在当今世界搞科学研究，必须重视开题报告的写作。如果不重视开题报告的写作，即使是有名望的研究者，也不免有科研课题告吹的命运。开题报告一般为表格式，它把要报告的每一项内容转换成相应的栏目，这样做，既便于开题报告按目填写，避免遗漏；又便于评审者一目了然，把握要点。以下是英语硕士论文开题报告，供大家参考。
　　
　　英语硕士论文开题报告范例：
　　
　　题目：A Corpus-based Study on SyntacticFeatures of Business English Correspondence
　　
　　1 Introduction
　　
　　1.1 Background of the Study
　　
　　China plays a much more important role in world economic system along with thedevelopment of economic globalization. Economic globalization not only accelerates our country'seconomic growth, but also promotes the speed of international trade all over the world. Thereforeexcellent business communication competence becomes increasingly important as well. As one ofthe language media business English correspondence aims to link overseas and domestic economicentities, exchange information, communicate with each other and deal with business. It plays anextremely important role in the frequent international trade. It is no exaggeration to say, businessEnglish correspondence is used in every step of business activities.
　　
　　The course of business English writing has almost expanded into every university curriculum.Both foreign and domestic scholars have done researches on business English correspondencefrom the perspective of lexicon, semantic fields, especially based on corpus. There are two majorlarge-scale corpora on business English. One is Nelson's Business English Corpus （BEC for short）accounting for one million words. The other one is Poly U Business Corpora constructed by HongKong Polytechnic University. The Poly U Business Corpora are made up of three comparablecorpora of Chinese, English and Japanese business texts, the majority of which originate from thebusiness and finance sections of newspapers written in those languages, covering news and reportsfrom auditing and accounting to insurance and investments. Each of the corpora has more than onemillion words. It is accessible on line for searching key words to see a concordance taken fromPoly U Business English corpus, which is helpful to students and teachers. It is thus obviously thatbusiness English is quite important so that attracts much attention from linguistic researchers. Ithas been an overriding aim of this project to create a resource for researchers to help furtherknowledge of an area which so far has been the research topic of many scholars.
　　
　　1.2 Significance of the Study
　　
　　This thesis makes a relatively complete study of business English correspondence from theperspective of lexical grammar theory and syntactic theory. It takes up business Englishcorrespondence as its research topic and aims to propose some feasible strategies in businessEnglish correspondence writing and teaching. The study expected to achieve both theoretical andpractical significance as follows:
　　
　　First of all, this study will introduce a new research method. Corpus provides a brand newway for the study of language. It breaks through the traditional method of intuitive experiencemethod and turns to the original analysis of natural language in order to provide a firm foundationand data support for language research in various fields. Traditional intuitive experience methodfocuses on personal experience and intuition, manual methods or introspective method whichcould acquire linguistic knowledge only from limited data of language materials. This method ofacquiring linguistic knowledge is not only inefficiency but also more subjective which inevitablyleads a effect on the accuracy of final result. However, corpus-based approach is totally different.Corpus can find the target data quickly by using computer software for scientific analysis, andovercome the limitation of traditional research on the subjectivity and one-sidedness. Thismacroscopic method can carry on a multi-level and all-rounded research on the basis of a largenumber of real data, and effectively promote the new theoretical model and research paradigm. Italso relies on computer science to achieve its powerful function in language searching, andprovides a new method in linguistic research for the majority of language researchers.
　　
　　Secondly, a clear understanding of lexical grammar theory could be achieved. Language is atool for human communication which inevitably cannot do without meaning expression andunderstanding. Sinclair broke the previous rules of describing vocabulary and grammar in aseparate way. Therefore, a new point of view has been proposed. That is language should bedescribed by using the way combining vocabulary and grammar which opened up a new path forlanguage description based on a corpus. Then he proposed lexical grammar, and believed thatvocabulary and grammar are equally important, in which vocabulary is the starting point forbuilding the language model. The key aspects about the origin of lexical grammar and thewholeness of lexis and grammar will be discussed in detail in next chapter and this study is basedon the theory of lexical grammar to explore the features of business English correspondence fromlexical and syntactic levels.
　　
　　Thirdly, after a relatively complete study on the business English correspondence, typicallexical and syntactic features could be worked out.
　　
　　Fourthly, feasible strategies could be proposed to business English correspondence writingand teaching.
　　
　　1.3 Layout of the Thesis
　　
　　In this thesis, the study will do some research on business English correspondence andmanage to summarize some common syntactic features of business English correspondence basedon lexical-grammar theory and syntactic theory. This thesis is divided into the following six parts:
　　
　　Chapter 1, the introduction part is an introduction concerning the theme of the thesis,including a general introduction of the background and significance of the study and theorganization of the whole thesis.
　　
　　Chapter 2, a literature review is provided in this chapter, which gives out an overview of thecorpus linguistics and business English correspondence. It first introduces business Englishcorrespondence and corpus linguistics briefly, and then gives a comprehensive introduction tothem which are also discussed here for better understanding to the field that the theory will beapplied to. Relevant studies both on Corpus linguistics and business English correspondence arealso presented at the end of each part.
　　
　　Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework which contains four main parts: principles ofbusiness English correspondence, the application in corpus linguistics, lexical grammar andsyntactic theory. Then Sinclair's lexical grammar theory and syntactic theory will be discussed indetail. In the end of this chapter, the writer will talk about the paper's feasibility.
　　
　　Chapter 4 addresses the research methodology of the study which includes the corpus-basedquantitative and qualitative method, the corpus and instruments used in the study, the proceduresof the study both in relation to data collection and data processing and concordance.
　　
　　Chapter 5 is the main part of the thesis of which lexical and syntactic features will bediscussed and analyzed in this part. Word length, sentence length, wordlist and some other wordfrequency will be listed and analyzed in detail.
　　
　　Chapter 6 draws a conclusion of the thesis, which gives a summary to the whole paper.Besides the major findings of the study, it also points out the limitations and difficulties of thepresent study.
　　
　　2 CONTENTS
　　
　　Abstract in Chinese
　　
　　Abstract in English
　　
　　1 Introduction
　　1.1 Background of the Study
　　1.2 Significance of the Study
　　1.3 Layout of the Thesis
　　
　　2 Literature Review
　　
　　2.1 Studies on Business English Correspondence Abroad and at Home
　　2.2 Studies based on Corpus Linguistics Abroad and at Home
　　2.3 Summary
　　
　　3 Theoretical Framework
　　
　　3.1 Writing Principles of Business English Correspondence
　　3.2 Lexical Grammar
　　3.3 Syntactic Theory
　　
　　4 Methodology
　　
　　4.1 Corpus-Based Approach
　　4.2 Research Instruments
　　4.3 Research Procedures
　　4.3.1 Data Collection
　　4.3.2 Data Clean-up
　　4.3.3 Tokenization
　　4.3.4 Lemmatization
　　4.3.5 Part-of-speech Tagging
　　
　　5 Results and Discussions
　　
　　5.1 Syntactic Complexity Analysis
　　5.1.1 Analysis of Word Length and Sentence Length
　　5.1.2 Contrastive Analysis between Content Words and Function Words
　　5.1.3 Contrastive Analysis between Simple Sentence and Complex Sentence
　　5.2 Syntactic Pattern Analysis
　　5.2.1 Passive Voice
　　5.2.2 Interrogative Sentence
　　5.2.3 Subjunctive Mood
　　5.3 Syntactic Feature Analysis
　　5.3.1 Syntactic Feature of Letters of Request and Comfirmation
　　5.3.2 Syntactic Feature of Letters of Acceptance and Refusal
　　5.3.3 Syntactic Feature of Letters of Appreciation and Apology
　　
　　6 Conclusion
　　
　　6.1 Major Findings
　　6.2 Implications for the Study
　　6.3 Limitations
　　
　　Acknowledgement
　　
　　References
　　
　　Appendix
　　
　　Papers published in the period of Ph. M. education
　　
　　3 进度安排
　　
　　1.Collecting the related materials and designing theresearch, data analysis: Sep.1st-Dec.31st,20XX
　　2.Writing the first draft: Jan.1st- Feb.31st, 20XX
　　3.Writing the second draft:Mar. 1st- Apr. 31st,20XX
　　4.Writing the final draft: May. 1st- May.31st,20XX
　　5.Preparing for defense of the thesis: June.1st- June31st,20XX
　　
　　4 References
　　
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