Synesis
In linguistics, synesis is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term referring to agreement due to meaning.
A constructio kata synesin is 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, a type of form-meaning mismatch.
Examples:
Here, the plural pronoun they and the plural verb form are co-refer 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, 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 interpretation and intended emphasis of the speaker or writer:
Other examples of Collective noun#Metonymic [merging of grammatical number|notional agreement for collective nouns] involve some uses of the words team and none.
Although American and [British English grammatical differences#Subject-verb agreement|notional agreement is more commonly used] in British English than in American English, some amount is natural in any variety of English. American style guides give advice, for example, on notional agreement for phrases such as a number of, a lot of, and a total of. The AMA Manual of Style says, "The number is singular and a number of is plural" and "The same is true for the total and a total of". This is the same concept that is covered by The [Chicago Manual of Style|Chicago style] at "5.9 Mass noun followed by a prepositional phrase", but not all of the relevant nouns are mass nouns.