Noun + Preposition Patterns: Reason For, Effect On, Increase In, and More

Advanced writing is full of noun-preposition frames: an increase in prices, the effect on retention, a reason for leaving, access to data.

The difficulty is not vocabulary alone. A writer may know effect and still produce an unnatural phrase because the relationship requires on, not a translated equivalent.

Notice the semantic role of the complement

• an increase in X — X is what changes;
• an increase of 12% — 12% is the amount of change;
• an increase from A to B — the endpoints are specified.

One noun can therefore take different prepositions when the relation changes.

Academic nouns deserve phrase-level study

Useful frames include evidence for, reference to, impact on, response to, difference between, and relationship with/between. Check them against real usage when necessary with corpus evidence.

The same lexical principle underlies adjective + preposition patterns and verb + preposition patterns. At C1, learning the family of frames together is far more efficient than treating each preposition as an isolated grammar problem.