Sentence structure of "We made them walk to the school"

Question

I came across the following sentence in a book:

We made them walk.

I see it conveys a different meaning compared to:

We made coffee.

In the second sentence the structure is Subject + Verb + Object.
But I'm finding it a bit difficult to identify the parts in the first sentence.
I feel them or walk cannot be objects of the sentence. Any help?

BillJ · Answer

We made them walk.

This is a catenative construction.
"Make" is a catenative verb and "walk" is a subordinate clause functioning as catenative complement of "make".
The intervening noun phrase "them" is the syntactic object of "make" and the semantic (understood) subject of the subordinate clause. It's called a 'raised' object because the verb that "them" relates to is higher in the constituent structure than the one it relates to semantically.
The term 'catenative' comes from the Latin word for "chain", which is appropriate here because the verbs "make" and "walk" do indeed form a chain, separated only by the NP "them".

Sentence structure of "We made them walk to the school"

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