Johanna,
    I tend to think of "effect" as far more primary and "affect" second
(outside psychology), so that no doubt influences my take on
things.>It would be interesting to google it or check the corpus
grammars.
   To me, the logic would be something like this:
   "Have an influence on" equals "influence".
   "Have an impact on" equals "impact"
   "Have an effect on" equals "affect"?
  Seems goofy to me. We have plenty of words that function as both noun
and verb. (hope, change, desire, result,far too many to list. I suspect
the difficulty comes, not from pronunciation pressures, but from the
confusion that arises from having a different spelling for the verb
version than for the more common noun one.

Craig

 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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