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                     THE LANGUAGE OF TRANSPORTATION

                              Dylan Holmes
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                              2022/June/23


The practical rules of language are surprisingly complex and
nuanced. Consider that sometimes we say "[person] drives [person] to
[location]". I thought the rules for that phrase were as simple as "A
person driving a vehicle ends up driving all of the occupants in the car
to any place the vehicle goes."  So the driver drives themself, and
drives all the occupants, to a particular destination and any
intermediate point along the way.


But I found at least one language user who, upon interrogation, revealed
a more nuanced theory built on concepts such as /transport beneficiary/,
/intended destination/ and /significant deviations from the planned
route/. In short, the idea is that "driving people places" is not just a
physical concept, but a social and mental one. It's not enough to know
who goes where; to use the phrase appropriately, you have to know
something about the intentions of the people involved.

Neither of us had noticed (let alone been explicitly taught!) that
"driving to" might be complicated in this way. The underlying theory was
implicit, drawn out by careful questioning.

Let me elaborate this intention-based theory of driving, by showing the
questions I asked and what the answers say about the theory.

1. If you give someone a ride to the store and drop them off, you're
   driving yourself and the passenger to the store, right?

   Answer: No, it's not about who /goes/ to the destination---it's
   about---I'm looking for a word---who /benefits/ or gets use from
   it. If you drop someone off at the store, you're providing an
   altruistic transportation service for them. You're driving that
   person to the store, but you're not driving yourself there.

2. What if you transport a sofa to a friend's house and they unload
   it. Have you driven the sofa to your friend's house?

   Answer: No, to use the phrase appropriately, you can only drive
   sentient things places. Mainly you drive people places. You can /say/
   that you drive pets and other animals places, but this is a kind of
   joke based on bending ordinary usage.

3. I can think of another non-sentient beneficiary. What if you take
   your vehicle in for repairs or cleaning?  Have you driven your car to
   the mechanic?

   Answer: First of all, let's distinguish between two meanings of "I
   drove X to some place". So far, we've been discussing when this means
   X is the /beneficiary/ of transportation, versus when X is just the
   /method/ of transportation. When X is a method of transporation, you
   say "I drove my car to the movies" and mean something like "I drove
   /myself/ to the movies using my car"---it's not the same kind of
   phrase we've been talking about so far.

   But a vehicle /can/ rarely be the beneficiary of transportation like
   a person can.  A vehicle is an honorary animal for the purposes of
   satisfying its mechanical upkeep.  You can drive a car to the
   mechanic for repairs, and when you do, you're driving only the car
   (who gets use out of the trip), not yourself.

4. I'm curious about this idea of a transport beneficiary. What about
   trips when you don't drop someone off? For example, you might briefly
   stop so that someone can return a library book and come right back.

   Answer: You must fully surrender a person to their destination, or
   else you didn't drive them there. The exact phrase "I drove them to
   the library, where they dropped off a book and came right back, then
   we went home" sounds off; I would instead say, "We went to the
   library to drop off a book".  Short hop-out errands don't count as
   driving-to-a-destination.

5. Where's the boundary between a hop-out errand and fully surrendering
   a person to the destination? Is it just that you've parked the car
   for a long time?  What if you park the car for a long time because
   you've gotten stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic?

   Answer: No, parking on its own isn't sufficient. It might not even be
   necessary; I'd have to think about it.

6. Well, consider this slightly outlandish scenario: suppose you're
   driving your kids along when you suddenly see that the fair is in
   town. The kids are excited to spend the day there on their
   own. There's no parking, so you pause briefly and let them out at the
   fair, where they spend the rest of the day.  You haven't parked, but
   it seems like you've "fully surrendered them" since they'll be gone
   for the day. I'd say you've driven them to the fair. Is that right?

   Answer: Actually, no. I'm beginning to see that the language of
   driving depends crucially on where you /plan/ to go. When driving
   someone someplace, the destination must be a pre-meditated
   milestone. Short detours and spontaneous stops generally don't count:
   if you're driving to the library and you pull over at a fair or a
   restaurant along the way, you didn't drive "to the fair" or "to the
   restaurant", no matter how much time you spend there. You physically
   went there, but because it wasn't a premeditated milestone on your
   route, it wasn't "driving to X".

7. That's an interesting intent-based distinction. I'd like to test its
   limits with a more extreme scenario. Suppose you're in the car with
   your kids, heading to your intended destination. Along the way, you
   see the airport. Because you're an especially spontaneous person, you
   ask if your kids would like to spend the summer in another
   country. They are used to your spontaneity and readily agree. You
   pull over at the airport, maybe you park or maybe you don't, hand
   them a wad of cash, and send them on their way. They spend the summer
   in another country before returning. Did you drive your kids to the
   airport?

   Answer: No, because the trip was a spontaneous detour from your
   intended destination. One of the crucial features of this story is
   that the airport was /along the way/. In contrast, if you had
   conceived of the airport idea midway through your drive and had to
   re-route across town in order to get to the airport, then you might
   reasonably say that you "drove your kids to the airport".

   The rough rule of thumb is that if you have to instantiate a new
   mental milestone X in your route plan, then you drive someone to
   X. So there's a qualitative distinction between short-ish detours
   that don't require much deviation from the original trip (they don't
   count as driving to X), and longer ones (which require rerouting and
   do count as driving to X). I'm sure you could think of ambiguous
   middle cases.

8. I wonder who has to plan the route?  If you are operating the
   vehicle, but the person sitting next to you has a secret destination
   X in mind and is giving you turn-by-turn directions to X, when you
   arrive did you drive someone to X?

   Answer: No, that would simply be a case of the driver operating the
   vehicle for someone else's route. In order to count as driving to X,
   the driver must have personally instantiated the route in mind and
   arrived at the destination.

9. How specific does the intention have to be? If I'm hungry and I drive
   around, looking for a restaurant that catches my eye, eventually
   landing at restaurant X, have I driven myself to X?

   Answer: General intent isn't sufficient for driving-to. But the way
   /I/ usually drive around, I begin with a particular area in
   mind---maybe a part of town. You could reasonably say "I drove /to
   the east side of town/", but not "I drove to restaurant X" unless you
   had specifically planned to go there.  It is as if the restaurant is
   a minor flourish on your plan to drive to a particular part of town
   for food.

10. Couldn't you just sort of drive around without any preconceptions,
    taking turns spontaneously? Is there a way to drive a car without
    "driving to" any place at all?

    Answer: In my own ordinary frame of mind, I always have some higher
    order intention even if it's as vague as "head rightward", or "head
    out of town".  It'd take a really significant disruption of my
    ability to form plans in order for me to end up driving without
    "driving to". It doesn't sound healthy.

11. What about thwarted expectations? Say you drive to a place and find
    it's closed---or worse, you go to restaurant X and find that it's
    been replaced with a completely different restaurant Y. How does
    "driving to" work in this case?

    "Driving to" depends on your mental model of the route, and hence
    destinations are based on the contents of your mind. Even if
    restaurant X was replaced by restaurant Y decades ago without your
    knowledge, ultimately you "drove to restaurant X and found out it
    had been replaced by restaurant Y". Or you "drove to restaurant X
    and found it was closed on mondays."

12. How much does route-finding depend on having choice points?  Suppose
    you're on an unfamiliar road. At the end of that road (unbeknown to
    you) is a dead end with a single restaurant and nothing else. You do
    happen to know already that the road doesn't branch. In practice,
    this means that if you head out on this road looking for food, you
    will inevitably end up at this restaurant.  You know that there are
    no choice points, but you don't know about the restaurant---if you
    end up eating at that restaurant, did you end up "driving to" the
    restaurant?

    Answer: Route finding doesn't depend on choice points. It depends on
    your ability to conceptualize your route. Even if you are
    effectively railroaded into a single destination, if your mental
    route didn't instantiate the destination, then it wasn't "driving
    to" that destination.