Can anyone think of other examples of "make + object + past participle" which sound natural in English - examples like 'make yourself understood'?

Most such structures seem clumsy - 'I made him worried' is better put (maybe) as 'I worried him'.

quote:

Originally posted by newnickname:
'I made him worried' is better put (maybe) as 'I worried him'.

Maybe? Depends what you mean to say.One is more direct. 'I made him worried' means 'I set events in train which led to him being worried' or 'I caused him to be/ to become worried'. 'I worried him' means 'I directly worried him', 'I said or did something to him which immediately worried him'

Wouldn't "I (indirectly) caused him to be worried" be better expressed by "I had him worried" or "I got him worried"?

What inspired this was a Korean text book on English which had 'I made my dog killed' as an example sentence (meaning 'I killed my dog' - we think).

I guess the writer of the book was taking a line through structures like "I made myself understood" or "I made him happy" - where there is an object complement - plus "they delivered it fresh" or "they delivered it broken".

My Korean student is asking why not "I made it broken" or "I made it killed"?

I thought maybe it was because we could only use past participles which are adjectives after make + object. That would explain why not 'killed', but 'broken' is an adjective.

I then thought it's because we have a more straightforward alternative; 'I broke it, I killed it' (or 'I made it break'). But usually it's OK to have half a dozen different ways to say the same thing in English.

I now think it's simply because we have another structure - make + object + base verb, which means that if you say "I made my dog killed" to a native speaker of English, it's ambiguous, and he or she will respond, "You made your dog kill what?"

I'm not sure though, which is why I'm looking for examples of what can and can't - naturally - follow make + object, and why.

Is Korean 'I made my dog killed' an attempt at 'I had my dog killed'?Isn't English wonderful ? We could say 'I caused my dog to be killed' too.

'I make myself understood' is a reflexive construction akin to 'se...faire' in French.(Not that that information helps a foreign student much )

As for 'I had him worried' or 'I got him worried' , to me that suggests the unspoken 'but he recovered/ ceased to be worried'.It is not final but pregnant with the suggestion that the state of mind was temporary.It all gets better, doesn't it ? French is bad enough!