Can the word "largest" be a noun?

Question

Trees are known as the largest of all plants.

Philip · Accepted Answer

It's still an adjective.  The use of 'the' is not because it becomes a noun but rather because it is part of the superlative form of the adjective.

Cool Breeze · Answer

I agree with Philip. However, you can decide about the preferred label yourself. There is no universally true and correct answer to things like this. If a scholar decides to call superlatives nouns in some contexts, that's his preference. I find it pointless to argue about things like that.

To further encourage your fascination with parts of speech, I'll give you another sentence:

The best is yet to come.

That's from an old song. Either the best is an adjective acting as a subject, or it is a noun, because it definitely is the subject of the sentence. There is a basic grammatical rule that the + adjective substantivizes the adjective: The rich like money. Why couldn't the + superlativealso substantivize the adjective?

CB

BillJ · Answer

AnonymousTrees are known as [the largest of all plants].

No, largest is not a noun. Sometimes, what we call 'fusion' occurs between a modifier and the head of a noun phrase and that's what's happening here: the adjective 'largest' serves as a modifier and as head of the bracketed noun phrase at the same time (i.e. they're 'fused'), so the reference is to trees being the largest members of a set consisting of 'all plants'. You find examples of fused modifier-heads like this quite often:

'Should I wear the red shirt or [the blue]'? (we understand 'the blue' to mean 'the blue shirt')

'[The youngest of their children] was still at school'. (the reference is to the youngest member of the set consisting of their children)

'[The French] don't take these things too seriously'. ('the French' means French people in general)

BillJ

Can the word "largest" be a noun?

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