The phrase "a distinctive role" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a unique or specific function that someone or something has within a particular context or system.
Example: "In the project, she played a distinctive role that set her apart from the other team members."
Alternatives: "a unique function" or "a special position".
The trust said the BBC had to do more to develop a "distinctive role online".
Each one also imagined a distinctive role for believers within it.
The London-based IFS has come to play a distinctive role in Britain's elections.
Greek expatriate communities play a distinctive role in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and South Africa.
Still, "in places that are in distress, like Disney and the New York Stock Exchange, it can be a good idea, because there is a distinctive role for the chairman," said Mr. Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management.
A scenario in which Britain leaves the European Union presents charities, in particular, with a distinctive role – not least because many of the people we work for, and with, voted for it.
Future studies are a decisive part of the public decision process which plays a very distinctive role in the desirable future of a society.
For anyone who believes – as I do – that comedy can be play a prominent, distinctive role in political conversation, that satire should be more profound than the milquetoast, backslappy, non-partisan wisecracking that often passes for it on TV, 2015 is a more satisfying time to watch live comedy than 2005.
But, in philosophy, definitions have also been called in to serve a highly distinctive role: that of solving epistemological problems.
(This is the moral concern, and corresponding role of legality, developed in Dworkin 1986, see also Dworkin 2011. Alternative interpretivist hypotheses might assign to legality a similarly distinctive role in relation to some other moral concern).
Thus, according to Griffiths and Stotz, to assign a causally distinctive role to DNA, as Waters does, is to ignore key aspects of how the gene makes its product.
