drove him

Azz, I found your question so interesting that I just had to reply,

I do not have the answer. I will leave that to David, Gustavo, and other members.

Cop (police officer): Where did you find him?

Tom: On the sofa.

Cop: What condition was he in?

Tom: He was unconscious.

Cop: What did you say? The plane that has just flown over us was so noisy!

Tom: I said that I (had) found him unconscious on the sofa.

Cop: Thank you, sir. I will write in my report that you (had) found him on the sofa  unconscious,

(Please correct my mistakes.)

Hi, TheParser,

@TheParser posted:

Tom: I said that I (had) found him unconscious on the sofa.

Cop: Thank you, sir. I will write in my report that you (had) found him on the sofa  unconscious,

You have made a good point. Object complements ("unconscious," in this case) tend to sound more natural when appearing after the object they refer to:

- I found him unconscious on the sofa.

If there is an adverbial between the object and the object complement, the sentence will not sound so natural, as is the case with the officer writing a report:

- Place: sofa / State: unconscious => I will write in my report that you found him on the sofa unconscious/in an unconscious state.

@azz posted:

a. I drove John to the hospital unconscious.
b. I drove him to the hospital unconscious.

c. I drove John, unconscious, to the hospital.
d. I drove him, unconscious, to the hospital.

I think all of those examples are correct. With adverbials of direction (in this case, "to the hospital"), there is a stronger need to place those adverbials next to the verbs of movement they relate to. That, I think, accounts for the position of "to the hospital" in (a) and (b) and for the commas Azz felt needed to be inserted in (c) and (d). In (a) and (b), just as in your second example above, TheParser, we can always resort to a longer phrase like "in an unconscious state/condition" for the object complement to sound better in that end position.

Thank you for the good advice, Gustavo.

@azz posted:

a. I drove John to the hospital unconscious.
b. I drove him to the hospital unconscious.

c. I drove John, unconscious, to the hospital.
d. I drove him, unconscious, to the hospital.

Which of the above are grammatical and meaningful?

Obviously I couldn't have been unconscious when I drove him/John to the hospital, so John has to be the one who is unconscious.

Hello, everybody—Try as I might, I am not able to hear any of those sentences as indicating grammatically that he/John was unconscioius. I think that, from a strict syntactic and semantic standpoint, each of those sentences indicates that "I" (the driver) was unconscious as "I" drove him/John to the hospital.

Now, "drive" is a versatile verb, and it can indeed be used in the object-complement pattern, as it is in the song title "She Drives Me Crazy." However, in that usage, the verb has an entirely different, causative meaning. There is no transportational meaning in "She drives me crazy."

What is it that tells us that the transportational meaning of "drive," and not the causative meaning, is involved here? It is the directional phrase "to the hospital." John's being driven to the hospital involved a change in John's—and the driver's—physical location, not a change in John's psychological state.