0

It's the closest that humans come to being superheroes.

-New Yorker-

If I rephrase it, it becomes

  1. It's the closest.
  2. Humans come the closest to being superheroes.

What I wonder is are the part of speech of "closest" in 1 and the part of speech of "closest" in 2 different?

I think "closest" in 1 is a noun and "closest" in 2 is an adverb. Or are they both adjectives?

Biet
  • 109
  • 1
  • 4
  • Your rephrased #2 doesn't mean the same as the original. The original means that in some (previously-identified) context-specific situation, humans come closer to being superheroes than in any other situation. The revised version means that no other possible candidates (animals? aliens?) are as much like superheroes as humans are. – FumbleFingers Feb 13 '24 at 11:21
  • @FumbleFingers The question was about POS, not meaning. – BillJ Feb 13 '24 at 13:42
  • @BillJ: Yeah, yeah. But if the OP doesn't know about that change of meaning, I suggest it's infinitely more important that he should understand what the two different utterances actually mean than some relatively worthless "syntactic labels". Labels that from the OP's perspective are in a foreign language, on top of being primarily designed to describe ancient Greek and Latin syntax, rather than modern English. – FumbleFingers Feb 13 '24 at 13:56
  • @FumbleFingers Whether it's more important or not is not a matter for you to decide. The OP asked about grammatical POS, and you should respect their request. Your comments about labels are nonsense. Instructors often use them in diagrams to help students visualise grammatical constructions. Your reference to Greek and Latin is irrelevant. – BillJ Feb 13 '24 at 14:49

2 Answers2

1

Your rephrasing doesn't make sense. Closest is always the superlative of the adjective close.

It (whatever activity the newspaper is referring to) makes human beings feel like superheroes more than any other activity does.

Kate Bunting
  • 54,408
  • 4
  • 69
  • 110
  • Thank you very much, but if "the closest" in "humans come the closest to being superheroes." is an adjective, is "come" a copular verb like "be" as in "I'm the closest"? – Biet Feb 13 '24 at 09:40
  • Yes, I think so. Come close, as well as its literal meaning, can mean 'be similar to something'. – Kate Bunting Feb 13 '24 at 09:47
0

It's the closest [that humans come to being superheroes].

Most relative clauses have nominals as antecedent, but it is also possible to have a superlative adjective like "closest" as antecedent. The relative clause is enclosed in square brackets.

Humans come [the closest to being superheroes].

Unlike [1] this is not a relative construction. Again "closest" is an adjective with "the" functioning as modifier, and the preposition phrase "to being superheroes" as complement of "closest". The whole bracketed adjective phrase is then complement of "come".

Note that in an example like That fish is the biggest that I've ever seen, the biggest (that) I've ever seen is a noun phrase with "the" functioning as determiner.

BillJ
  • 16,811
  • 1
  • 16
  • 28