Synesis

Synesis is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term derived from Greek σύνεσις (originally meaning "unification, meeting, sense, conscience, insight, realization, mind, reason"). A constructio kata synesin (or constructio ad sensum in Latin) means a grammatical construction in which a word takes the gender or number not of the word with which it should regularly agree, but of some other word implied in that word. It is effectively an agreement of words with the sense, instead of the morphosyntactic form.

Example:

If the band is popular, they will play next month.

Here, the plural pronoun they co-refers with the singular noun band. One can think of the antecedent of they as an implied plural noun such as musicians.

Such use in English grammar is often called notional agreement (or notional concord^[1]), because the agreement is with the notion of what the noun means, rather than the strict grammatical form of the noun (the normative formal agreement). The term situational agreement is also found, since the same word may take a singular or plural verb depending on the interpretation and intended emphasis of the speaker or writer; so:

The government is united. (Implication: it is a single cohesive body, with a single agreed policy).

The government are divided. (Implication: it is made up of different individuals, with their own different policy views).

Notional agreement for collective nouns is very common in British English. It is less customary in American English, but may sometimes be found after phrases of the type "a collective noun of plural nouns", e.g.,^[2]

... a multitude of elements were intertwined (New York Review of Books).

... the majority of all the shareholdings are in the hands of women. (Daedalus).

... a handful of bathers were bobbing about in the waves. (Philip Roth).

The use of a singular or plural verb after the phrases "one of those who" and "one of those things that" has troubled prescriptivists, with both choices garnering their detractors. More descriptive style guides have accepted both as correct.^[3]

Other words originally plural have long been notionally singular that they are always followed by a singular verb: news, means, and mathematics.^[3]

References

1. ^ Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; Svartvik, Jan (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Harlow: Longman. ISBN 0582517346. http://books.google.com/books?id=CrhZAAAAMAAJ&pgis=1. 
2. ^ Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (3e, 1996)
3. ^ ^{a b} Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1995). Entries "Notional agreement" (p.666) and "One of those who" (p. 690).

See also

• American and British English differences: Formal vs. notional agreement
• Formal agreement, the opposite of notional.
• Collective noun, whose notion is plural but form singular.
• Singular they, whose notion is singular but form plural.
• Elohim, a Hebrew word whose number varies.