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
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionism, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalism, Transcendentalist movement of th ...
Besides distributive
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...
s, there are also distributive
determiner
Determiner, also called determinative ( abbreviated ), is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with a noun to express its reference. Examp ...
s (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'')
Languages other than English
Biblical Hebrew
A common distributive idiom in
Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew ( or ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite languages, Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Isra ...
used an ordinary word for man, ish'' (). Brown Driver Briggs only provides four representative examples—Gn 9:5; 10:5; 40:5; Ex 12:3.
Of the many other examples of the idiom in the
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" . '' iteral*... each went home. enseThis word, ish'', was often used to distinguish men from women. "She shall be called Woman () because she was taken out of Man ()," is well known, but the distinction is also clear in Gn 19:8; 24:16 and 38:25 (see note for further references). However, it could also be used generically in this distributive idiom (Jb 42:11; I Ch 16:3).Brown Driver Briggs:36.
Greek
The most common distributive pronoun in classical
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
was ''hekastos'' (, each).
See also
*
Adjective
An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...
*
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...