"They each"

Question

"Each" is singular, right?Three people, three cars.Each owns a car. Each has a car. Each one has a car.But..."They each" own a car. "They each" have a car. They have a car each.Clearly, it's the "they" that makes whatever else happens plural, but what is the singular/plural status of "each" when "they" gets thrown into the mix like this?

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]"Each" is singular, right? Three people, three cars. Each owns a car. Each has a car. Each one has a ... else happens plural, but what is the singular/plural status of "each" when "they" gets thrown into the mix like this?[/nq]
You got it backward. It's "each" that's 'thrown into the mix'.

"Each" is functioning as an adverb here, not a pronoun; hence it has no number and doesn't govern agreement. That leaves "they", which is plural.
"Each" and "all" (but not "some" or "every", for example) can undergo 'Quantifier-Float', a rule that relates sentences like these:

Each of the boys has written a letter/*letters.

> The boys each have written a letter/letters.
The boys have each written a letter/letters.
All of the boys have written a letter/letters.

> The boys all have written a letter/letters.
The boys have all written a letter/letters.
*The boys {some} has/have {some} written a letter/letters. *The boys {some} has/have {every} written a letter/letters.

Notice that in the second Q-Floated sentences the Q comes after the first auxiliary verb, which is the standard adverb position. "Each" (though not "all") can also be floated to the adverbial end position ("... a letter each"), provided the correlative object isn't pluralized.
Determiners (of which quantifiers are one type, and articles another) are really complex. For more about quantifiers, see http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/q-neg.html
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept "'Meaning' is one of the words of which one may say that they have odd jobs in our language...What causes most trouble in philosophy is that we are tempted to describe the use of important 'odd-job' words as though they were words with regular functions." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

"They each"

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions