Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
NOTIONAL AGREEMENT (NOTIONAL CONCORD)
is the agreement or concord of verbs with their subjects and of pronouns with their antecedent nouns on the basis of meaning rather than form. If you think of committee as one entity, then The committee has its agenda; if you think of committee as representing several people, then The committee have their agenda. Notional agreement gives us sentences like these from British English: The government are eager to compromise. Manchester United are ahead, three to nil. Americans would use is in both sentences, having different notions of the entities government and athletic team. And these from American English also illustrate: My admiration and love for her is without limit. Everybody has their own opinion of the proposal. All these are usage problems because although no one is confused about what they mean, strict grammatical agreement of plurals with plural forms and singulars with singular forms doesn’t occur. Edited English tries usually to avoid these last structures, and many a Standard-using reader will find fault with them whenever they notice them. If you saw that one (reader … they), then you are probably quite able to police your own writing for agreement problems; if you missed it, you must decide whether your readers will accept a particular notional agreement without objection or whether they will insist absolutely on full grammatical concord.
