8. Using Sketch Engine to explore the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’

Gessica Dunker

Undergraduate student at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

José Drechsler

Undergraduate student at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Luiza Meyer

Undergraduate student at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Mateus Charloto

Undergraduate student at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Rita De Leeuw

Undergraduate student at Montclair State University

Even though the words “affect” and “effect” have very distinct uses and meanings in English, learners of English usually mix them up. This is especially true for learners of English who have Portuguese or Spanish as a first language. To help learners better understand the difference between these two words, in this chapter, we will use corpus to illustrate where and how these words are used in context. The aim of the activities in this chapter is to clarify the differences between these words for students with the help of corpus-informed data.

STEP 1: CORPUS ANALYSIS

In the first part of the class, we suggest that the teacher utilizes the corpus manager Sketch Engine to access two corpora: the English Web 2020 Corpus (enTenTen20) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Both “affect” and “effect” lemmas should be searched in these corpora, and the features analyzed in both corpora were “concordance” and “frequency”.

The results of the corpora searches are as follows:

AFFECT vs EFFECT 

Table 1 – Frequencies of “affect” & “effect” in the English Web 2020 Corpus (enTenTen20) and the British National Corpus (BNC)

Not surprisingly, the most frequent combinations showed that the particle “to” usually appears before “affect” and that the particle “the” usually appears before “effect”. The teacher could conduct the same search in class, highlight these linguistic patterns of co-occurrence, and ask students to explain why they co-occur with these words. In addition, the teacher could use Sketch Engine’s “concordance” and “frequency” for both corpora, and highlight the following findings:

English Web 2020 – Sketch Engine

• Within the first one thousand words which appear right after the article “the”, “effect” occupies the 131st place whereas “affect” does not appear at all.
• Within the first one thousand words which appear right after the particle “to”, “affect” occupies the 630th place whilst “effect” is the 997th one.

British National Corpus (BNC) – Sketch Engine

• Within the first one thousand words which appear right after the article “the”, “effect” occupies the 60th place whereas “affect” does not appear at all.
• Within the first one thousand words which appear right after the particle “to”, “affect” occupies the 489th place whilst “effect” is the 759th one.

By analyzing the concordance and collocate features in Sketch Engine, the students should come up with some (or all) of the following conclusions:

1. “Effect” is used more frequently as a noun since it often appears right after the article “the”, whilst “affect” is rarely used as a noun. It occurs almost exclusively in Psychology academic context, and its meaning and use in context can be seen here:
   1. “a set of observable manifestations of an experienced emotion: the facial expressions, gestures, postures, vocal intonations, etc., that typically accompany an emotion. Evidence from several clinical groups indicates that reduced accuracy in decoding facial affect is associated with impaired social competence”.
   2. “patients … showed perfectly normal reactions and affects … Other victims of schizophrenia sometimes lapse into flat affect, a zombielike state of apparent apathy”.
   3. “[Affect can be] the conscious emotion that occurs in reaction to a thought or experience. Positive affect encompasses all good emotions, such as joy, bliss, love, and contentment”.
   4. “…and meaningless mass murder without affect, as the psychologists say, … have become too frequent occurrences in contemporary life”.
   5. “Affect” is almost always used as a verb, hence it is common that it will appear just after the particle “to”. Although “effect” can also be found immediately after “to” as well, it will occur many fewer times than “affect”.

To summarize, the following conclusion can be made regarding the distinction between “affect” and “effect”: A is affected by B, which produces a C effect, but C cannot exist unless the relation A-B exists. Therefore, these are the differences between the words in terms of morphology as much as in terms of semantics.

STEP 2: PRACTICE ACTIVITY

The following activities can be used to check if students comprehended the topic instead of learning it by heart. Students will be prompted to review non-standard use of the words “affect” and “effect” and will need to explain their differences. This exercise demands not only the understanding of the grammar aspect of the matter, but also its application in real life, specifically in the context of technology.

Activity #1

While both words, “affect” and “effect”, can be used as either a noun or a verb, using a corpus tells us that “affect” most commonly appears in its verb form and “effect” in its noun form.  The words function differently from one another but can sometimes be used to express similar ideas.  For each of the following sentences that includes the verb “affect,” write a sentence that communicates the same information using the noun “effect,” and vice versa.  In some cases, additional content words must be added.

Example: The effect of Moore’s Law on daily life is obvious. (MAG)

The way that Moore’s Law affects daily life is obvious.

1.)   She told me that at first it seemed to have had more of an effect on her sister. (FIC)

2.)   You know Adele’s hit, the song “Hello,” is having a very bizarre effect on women. (SPOK)

3.)   The choice of music affects student motivation. (ACAD)

4.)   The civilized world had finally produced a microbe so resistant to antibiotics that no drug had any effect on it. (FIC)

5.)   I just hope all this doesn’t really affect him. (SPOK)

6.)   The sporting activity has a beneficial effect on breathing and cardiovascular function. (BLOG)

7.)   Collective bargaining fuels innovations in wages, benefits, and work practices that affect both unionized and nonunionized workers. (BLOG)

8.)   This increased carbon dioxide level means increased acidity in the water which affects sea life. (BLOG)

9.)   The effect of the courses on faculty behavior in the classroom has been substantial. (ACAD)

10.)  The artist says that working in oils has affected the watercolors, making them more intense in color. (MAG)

Activity #2: Be a Linguist

Collaborate grammatically by answering the following questions:

1. Programmers from the company “EduTech” are developing an app that creates texts in an automated way. This program, called “TXT Maker,” only requires the users to input the main topic of the essay. Then, based on a large corpus and after making a lot of mathematical calculations, the algorithm finds a pattern in texts with the same entered topic. Next, it stores the most commonly used words and linguistic constructions to, finally, generate a text. During the testing phase, the programmers typed “global warming” and obtained the following fragments in the output:

The affects of global warming are increased heat, drought and insect outbreaks.

…

It seems that to effect the planet is something inherent in the pursuit of profit.

They were not sure about the quality of the results in terms of grammar and, because of that, the team decided to hire a linguist: you.

Your work here is to answer the questions elaborated by them in order to improve the app. Initially, the project coordinator asked you if there was something grammatically wrong with the output and, in the affirmative case, you should explain it better. You reply to the coordinator via email with the following message:

Charloto, M., De Leeuw, R., Drechsler, J., Dunker, J., & Meyer, L. (2023). Using Sketch Engine to explore the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’. In L. Goulart & I. Veloso (Eds). Corpora in English Language Teaching: Classroom Activities for Teachers New to Corpus Linguistics. Open Educational Resource. Montclair State University.