Distributive pronoun

A distributive pronoun considers members of a group separately, rather than collectively.

They include either, neither and others.

"to each his own" — 'each2,(pronoun)' Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (2007)
"Men take each other's measure when they react." — Ralph Waldo Emerson^[1]

Besides distributive pronouns, there are also distributive determiners (also called distributive adjectives). The pronouns and determiners often have the same form:

Each went his own way (each used as a pronoun, without an accompanying noun)
Each man went his own way (each used as a determiner, accompanying the noun man)
Each of the answers is correct (each used as a pronoun, with an accompanying prepositional phrase of the answers)

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Languages other than English

Biblical Hebrew

A common distributive idiom in Biblical Hebrew used an ordinary word for man, 'ish (איש‎). Brown Driver Briggs only provides four representative examples—Gn 9:5; 10:5; 40:5; Ex 12:3.^[2] Of the many other examples of the idiom in the Hebrew Bible, the best known is a common phrase used to describe everyone returning to their own homes. It is found in 1 Samuel 10:25 among other places.^[3]

איש לביתו‎
... 'ish l'beyto.
... a man to his house. [literal]
... each went home. [sense]

This word, 'ish, was often used to distinguish men from women. "She shall be called Woman (אשה‎) because she was taken out of Man (איש‎)," is well known,^[4] but the distinction is also clear in Gn 19:8; 24:16 and 38:25 (see note for further references).^[5] However, it could also be used generically in this distributive idiom (Jb 42:11; I Ch 16:3).^[6]

Greek

The most common distributive pronoun in classical Greek was hekastos (ἕκαστος, each).

References

^ William Malone Baskervill and James Witt Sewell, An English Grammar Archived 2005-09-19 at the Wayback Machine, 1896.
^ Brown Driver Briggs: 36.
^ Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
^ King James Version of the Bible
^ Also Ex 22:15; Lv 15:16, 18; 20:10f; Nu 5:13f; Dt 22:22f; Is 4:1; and others. Brown Driver Briggs:35.
^ Brown Driver Briggs:36.

External links

Look up distributive in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Jeffrey T. Runner and Elsi Kaiser. 'Binding in Picture Noun Phrases: Archived 2006-09-18 at the Wayback Machine Implications for Binding Theory'. In Proceedings of the HPSG05 Conference. Edited by Stefan Müller. Lisbon: CSLI Publications, 2005.
Glossary of English Grammar Terms UsingEnglish.com