English grammar question. Both of the boys have red apples. So: "Each of the boy's apples is red" OR "Each of the boys' apples is red" ???
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The second is correct. The question about the apostrophe is really, are we talking about one boy or both boys? (We can ignore "is red" and look at just the subject nounal phrase.) We can parse this as {Each of} {the boys' apples}, where the latter is another nounal phrase ...
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... which could be replaced by the pronoun "them", and it must be plural because "each of" requires plurality. We're left with "the boys' apples." So far, this is all syntactic, but we need to use the semantic information that no single boy has more than one apple, so because ...
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... "apples" is undeniably plural, it means that both boys must be implicated, so the apostrophe goes after the "s". But we could also say, "each boy's apple is red" and it deconstructs to {{each boy}'s {apple}} is red, where "each boy" is a singular nounal phrase.
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