Off the top of my head I can only think of certain/cierto, do you have other examples in mind?
Spanish Spanish
- Thread starter J.M
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I think certus usually does come before the noun when it means "a certain". But this may not be a strict rule, and in other meanings certus can come either before or after the noun.
Thank you, I'm beginning to accumulate a little collection of Spanish Grammars; yet the one which I would really like is out of print, so the collection continues to grow. Anyway I think that I found the answer in one of the grammars, but I don't see it anywhere else curiously. Let me know what you think of this:
So, the comparative and superlative forms for both adverbs and adjectives are constructed similarly. Please note that rico is an adjective while pronto is here as an adverb. The phase in question lo más parecidos posible, uses what appears to be the comparative adjective in parecidos. And although the rule about possibility is listed for adverbs, I'm only guessing that this rule pertains also to adjectives.
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This is getting confusing for me too now!
Although pronto is an adverb here, it can also be a adjective, and in ''lo más pronto posible" it could be either.
But if you replace it with an adverb in -mente, as in "lo más claramente posible", I can't say for certain that this is wrong, but it certainly sounds quite unusual to my ear. Does your grammar mention adverbs in -mente for this structure (lo más X posible)?
Although pronto is an adverb here, it can also be a adjective, and in ''lo más pronto posible" it could be either.
But if you replace it with an adverb in -mente, as in "lo más claramente posible", I can't say for certain that this is wrong, but it certainly sounds quite unusual to my ear. Does your grammar mention adverbs in -mente for this structure (lo más X posible)?
Apparently it's just me: https://cvc.cervantes.es/foros/leer_asunto1.asp?vCodigo=26005
The same ambiguity exists in Italian: e.g. "il più veloce possibile".
Thank you, so I think that I have enough information to parse lo más parecidos posible, and to say some things about it grammatically:
lo (neuter singular definite article) más (adverb modifies parecidos) parecidos (superlative adjective agreement with retratos) posible (idiomatic adjective).
So the common abstract (or substantive) noun combination of lo+adjective which we talked about earlier doesn't seem to apply here to either parecidos or posible. Therefore I would say that the main grammatical idea seems to be that of the superlative adjective [e.g. el más tranquilo]. I should add, the normal way to make a comparison of equality in Spanish, is [tan+adjective como+noun]. And so I'm suspecting that this type of statement is trying to combine the two ideas of a superlative adjective with a comparison of equality to form an absolute superlative. But that is pure guesswork. I think in Latin it would simply be quam+superlative.
Yet the word posible is problematic to parse, since according to the RAE, it is classified only as an adjective or noun, not an adverb. So at any rate, because an adjective like posible doesn't seem to fit in here (what word could it modify?), I would conclude that the expression is idiomatic. I mean that's what I initally thought, but my reason for going through this was primarily an attempt to analyze the word lo in particular since it keeps causing me problems.
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Parecidos alone isn't superlative. What makes the superlative is the combination of the definite article + más + the adjective.
Indeed, neither of those adjectives is substantivized here.
The "lo más + adjective" construction has nothing to do with the "tan + adjective + como" construction. It just so happens that "lo más + adjective", when followed by posible, translates idiomatically into English with English words that correspond almost literally to "tan + adjective + como". But that's only a matter of translation and of differing idioms in two different languages.
Correct. (A form of possum could optionally be added.)
The word posible is an adjective. I would say that, like lo, it sort of modifies the quality expressed in parecidos.
Or maybe the fact of making the portraits. A bit as when you say "I'll make them as lifelike as possible", that kind of stands for "I'll make them as lifelike as (is) possible (to make them)".
I'm afraid I can't tell you whether that sentence is idiomatic. (@rothbard ? @interprete ?)
In any case, posible modifies hacerlos, and I don't see what else you would say if not parecidos.
In any case, posible modifies hacerlos, and I don't see what else you would say if not parecidos.
I'd like to see what they say also. I'm guessing that you say that posible could modify hacerlos because hacerlos can be considered as a noun, and therefore modified by an adjective? But I was thinking also that posible could modify a substantive pronoun which refers back to the action of making the portraits.
"I'll make them most lifelike to the degree that it [the act of making most lifelike] is a possible thing (to make them)".
"Haré los retratos parecidísimos como ello [neuter nominative pronoun] sea posible hacerlos."
"Faciam... quomodo/quatenus id possibile est."
"I'll make them most lifelike to the degree that it [the act of making most lifelike] is a possible thing (to make them)".
"Haré los retratos parecidísimos como ello [neuter nominative pronoun] sea posible hacerlos."
"Faciam... quomodo/quatenus id possibile est."
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That's how it works in the sentence that you constructed above (whether that sentence is correct or not).
You'd probably have to remove hacerlos, then. (But again, I can't quite say if the sentence works.)
Thank you, asustar is listed as a transitive verb, how do you know that un sombrero is the subject and not the object?
Ford's grammar has no examples of that, here is the section about the -mente ending generally speaking:
Below is an example of -mente with a "true superlative" found in Ramsey and Spaulding
So from these I would guess that any adverb could fit the el/la/lo más x posible formula, including -mente. However, the above section from Ramsey lists 4 examples of the formula, but none of the adverbs have -mente. Maybe its not common because it lengthens the phrase more.
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I’m afraid I can’t really help here either, all I know for what it’s worth is that this sounds very wordy and unnatural. If I had to write or speak, I would not be confident that I can use como after a superlative in such a way, although maybe you actually can. Not sure!
Indeed, what sounded awkward to my ear was the -mente followed by posible. From the link I posted earlier this is perfectly correct although apparently avoided, which may (or may not) be why it sounds unusual to my Spanish-as-a-third-language ear.