Information about Synesis

Synesis (from Greek) means 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 refers to 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, because the agreement is with the notion of what the noun means, rather than the strict grammatical form of the noun. The term situational agreement is also found, since the same word may take a singular or plural verb depending on the 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 in 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". Fowler (3e, 1996) cites for example

... 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).

See also

• Collective noun
• Grammatical gender
• Grammatical number
• American and British English differences: section on formal and notional agreement