grammar difference between "to make dry dishes" vs "to make the dishes dry"

Question

(Background: I'm a native English speaker who is learning French. The more I learn about French grammar, the more questions I have about English grammar).

(More Background: I wanted to translate the sentence "I need a towel to make the dishes dry" into French, and Google Translate gave me a sentence that, when translated literally into English, seems to be "I need a towel to make dry dishes". It was doing this that made me wonder about the following question.).

I am wondering about the grammatical differences between

"make dry dishes"

and

"make the dishes dry"

(Note to English Learners: this is not the most natural way to say these sentences!)

I want to know what different grammatical contructions are used here. It seems to me that these two sentences mean somewhat different things; "make dry dishes" sounds like it could apply to if you are (for example) creating brand new dishes from clay; and "make the dishes dry" sounds like it is implying that the dishes are wet and you want to change that.

One confusion is that "dry" seems to be an adjective in both cases. What, then, grammatically makes the second sentence seem to imply a more "active" action?

Answer 1

The usual place for an attributive adjective is before the noun it modifies.
When one appears elsewhere that's a signal that something else is going on, and
it's probably not an attributive adjective, but a predicate adjective, like tall in He is tall.

• The verb phrase pattern make Adjective Noun, as in
  make dry dishes, make black tires, make chocolate fudge, make miniature steamshovels,
  is just a verb phrase with main verb make and a direct object noun phrase (e.g, black tires).

• The verb phrase pattern make Noun Adjective, as in
  make my drink sweet, make the dishes dry, make learning easy, make the bench smooth,
  is actually a complex one: the main verb make plus an infinitive complement clause, i.e,
  make my drink be sweet, make the dishes be dry, etc.

Notice that make already has the superpower of omitting to before infinitives:

• He made her go away, but not *He made her to go away.
• He made the dishes be dry, but not *He made the dishes to be dry.

When the infinitive is just an auxiliary be from a predicate adjective, make can delete that, too.
But the predicate adjective remains a predicate adjective; it just doesn't need an auxiliary verb.

Answer 2

For your example we wouldn't say either

I need a towel to dry the dishes

We aren't making them dry using another process, we're actively drying them.

However it appears that you're actually asking about the differences between the word order, so:

Make dry dishes = Make (create) dishes which are not wet.

Make the dishes dry = Take some existing dishes (which are presumably wet, due to the fact they can be dried) and dry them.

Answer 3

Basically agree with @johnlawler. Let me add:

In general, I think "make (adjective) (noun)" means to make something of type (noun) that is naturally or inherently (adjective). To "make (noun) (adjective)" means to take a thing of type (noun) which is not presently (adjective) and make it (adjective).

Like if someone said he was going to "make a dark room" -- assuming he didn't mean "darkroom" in the sense of a place where you develop photographs -- I'd take him to mean that he is going to create a room which will naturally be dark. Perhaps it has no windows, etc. But if he said he will "make the room dark", I'd think he meant he was going to turn off the lights.

Or, "make a comfortable chair", make a chair designed in such a way that it is comfortable, like made from soft cushions, well-proportioned to the human body, etc. "Make a chair comfortable": throw some pillows on it, etc.

Thus, "make dry dishes" sounds unlikely to me. My first thought is that it refers to the technique of making the dishes, like, we made them from clay without ever using water in the process. "Make dishes dry" sounds like an awkward way to say "dry the dishes".