Impacting (on) complement choice

After 20 years of teaching English, I've only recently become consciously aware that my students may be applying the complementation pattern of one word to its derivationally related partner. That is, they regularly say and write things like *it influenced on the situation using a prepositional phrase complement headed by on where the verb should really just take a direct object. Notice, though, that the noun influence licenses the on PP complement that the students are using (e.g., it had no influence on the outcome).


Now this is just a hypothesis, one that I think may have been mumbling away at itself in my subconscious for a long time. It may be that there is, in fact, no pattern to the choice of complement, and that the example above is just an instance of the human mind's desire to find meaning in noise. Nevertheless, I decided to begin compiling a list. Here's an example of what I mean:

Verbs		Nouns
Head	Comp	Head	Comp
emphasize	NP	emphasis	on NP
explain	NP	explanation	about NP
impact	NP	impact	on NP
research	NP	research	on/about NP
question	NP (+ about NP)	question	about NP
talk	(to NP) about NP	talk	about NP
concern	NP	concern	about NP
doubt	NP that content clause	doubt	about NP

I recently asked some colleagues if they were aware of such a list. Nothing exactly like this has been suggested yet, but one person did point out that the verb impact also allows an on complement and suggested that the transitive verb is actually relatively new.

It turns out that this is a BrE vs AmE difference. I queried Google ngrams and here's what I found:

BrE

AmE

Unfortunately, the scales aren't the same, but they're close. The Americans got things rolling in the early 70s, and by the early 80s, they'd made up their minds. They seem to have a strong preference for the transitive version, which they use about 400% more often than the on complement. When the British picked up the ball a decade later, they veered off in favour of the on complement, but it doesn't look like a very strong preference. By 2000, the verb was being used more in Britain than in the US (at least after will).