Craig,

Forgive the irony, but if you want a verb that means "have an effect  
on", a good choice is "affect."

"Effect" as a verb is probably pretty rare (as soon as I find my  
Cobuild grammar I'm going to look all this up), and "effective" being  
pretty usable as an adjective form of "affect", what I would predict  
is that the noun form will become "affect", as in "it had a negative  
affect", and "affective" (second-syllable stress) might come into  
common use in place of "effective".  The technical noun "affect" is  
not used wiidely, of course, so it doesn't present strong competition.

I don't think there's a meaning confusion involved here; I think it's  
all due to the spelling and the extension of "effective", with the  
rarity of "effect" as a verb contributing greatly. The first syllable  
(the vowel /æ/ or /i/) is reduced to schwa, and schwas are among the  
best candidates for misspelling. The default choice most people make  
when they hear schwa and don't know how to spell the word is the  
letter 'a'.

I don't know if anyone on this list is familiar with the work of Joan  
Bybee -- she is making enormous contributions to our understanding of  
language. This "effect" question is something she would probably have  
something to say about (although she works more on proving that much  
of uttered and written language comprises more or less formulaic or  
"prefab" expressions). She has done a lot of work on the history of  
languages as well as contemporary psycholinguistic experimentation  
and has proven a great deal of influence of one lexical item or  
phrase on another, and has shown how important frequency is  
entrenching a word or phrase and increasing its power to affect (!)  
other words/phrases. She also has a principle of "autonomy" by which  
a word or phrase becomes so strong and frequent that it begins to be  
perceived as no longer belonging to its original paradigm.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Dept.
Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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