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I naively asked a question about the use of "every" with possessives on the ELL thinking there will be a very simple answer. I was pretty sure that saying either

Every your thought is important to me.

or

Every thought of yours is important to me.

was just a matter of language register. Well, it seems to be a matter of the age you live in! Thanks to some helpful comments I was amazed to discover that "every" + possessive + noun was grammatical in Early Modern English, apparently present in Shakespeare. I must say I couldn't find examples of it in Shakespeare, neither in the KJV Bible, but in other old books that don't exist on the net. However, I did find it on the internet in a text from Medieval times (1480 approx.):

A century and a half later, the Northumberland Household Book prescribes: "Whensoever any of his Lordeship Servauntes be comaunded to ride on message in Winter...that every of theym be allowed for the tyme for his being furth in his jomay... for every meall and for every his baiting; and for his Hors every day and night of his saide jornay, ..." (Medieval Panorama, G. G. Coulton)

So this use must have been grammatical in Old English.

My question is: Does anyone know how "every" + possessive + noun shifted from being grammatical in Old English to not grammatical in Modern English? Is there any information on the evolution of this use of "every"?

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    We do not say "every your thought", although we do say "your every thought" instead. (Do not try to find logic behind it.)
    – GEdgar
    Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 11:52
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    Check out page 593 of The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory, which to my mind strongly suggests that the early usage you're referring to simply echoed the syntax of other European languages (and perhaps Latin), at a time when English itself was probably syntactically quite primitive / indeterminate.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 11:56
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    Two of the most common words to occur after every his... are ...child and ...children, with the sense that would normally be conveyed today by all his children. This is the kind of concept that's commonly referenced in wills and related legal texts. And as with religious texts, legal texts are very slow to reflect changes in mainstream language, which explains why NGrams shows the usage as far from uncommon in Victorian times even though it's very unfamiliar to the modern ear. (We might still read Dickens, but few of us read Victorian wills and such! :)
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 12:15
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    @FumbleFingers I guess I was rather confused about the whole matter... I just bumped into this structure again, and the confusions resurfaced. Thanks to your helpful comments I understand better now, so thanks.
    – fev
    Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 16:28
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    @MarcInManhattan: <swoons>
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jul 6, 2022 at 10:12

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I was amazed to discover that "every" + possessive + noun was grammatical in Early Modern English, apparently present in Shakespeare.

Yes, but "every" is used as a pronoun in your example:

for every meall and for every his baiting;

= for everyone, meal (crushed/ground cereal) and for everyone, his baiting (food supplies);

In "*Every your thought is important to me." every is a determiner and cannot modify another determiner (your)

"Your every (individual) thought is important to me." every is an adjective.

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  • Olofssohn (Every₃ in OED: A grammatically neglected determiner ... Nordic Journal of English Studies) offers an alternative analysis: ' every ... can take a postdeterminer (or adjectival?) position after a genitive (including possessives). Previously, 'In order to cover examples such as “his every whim”, COBUILD (alone) makes an ad hoc reclassification of every and labels it “adjective”.' [As the article addresses the OED classification, the (alone) caveat probably means (alone among other works).]
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Mar 31, 2023 at 18:21

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