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Factitive construction

Grammar
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A grammatical construction where a verb causes a subject to enter a new state (e.g., “She made him king”), common in poetic causatives.

Detailed Definition
Factitive construction is a grammatical structure in which a verb causes its object to become or be perceived as something else (e.g., “They elected him president”), and in poetry, such constructions can compress complex causality or transformation into a single verb phrase; poets exploit this syntactic efficiency to convey agency, metamorphosis, or social designation—“She named the wind sorrow”—thereby linking linguistic form to thematic concerns of power, identity, and change.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare’s “Let slip the dogs of war” uses factitive construction (make war happen); Emily Dickinson’s “He fumbles at your Soul” uses factitive to describe divine assault; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” uses “I made a model of you” as factitive; Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats” uses “may you” as factitive invocation; Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” uses “let it” as factitive self-command; contemporary poets use factitive to assert agency.
Additional Notes
Grammar making object into something (judge him guilty). Linguistic term—"causative" similar. Affects poetic syntax. Related: transitive verbs, case grammar. Example: "make," "render," "appoint" constructions.
Also Known As
Causative construction Making syntax Cause-to-do structure Productive voice
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