La concordancia (ad sensum) con sustantivos cuantificadores en español

It is well known that singular quantifying nouns referring to a plurality of entities often accept both “formal” and “conceptual” agreement. In our view, this double possibility does not correspond to the replacement of morphological agreement with government, as has been suggested, but rather there is agreement in the strict sense in both cases. Therefore we do not consider examples with plural forms –the only choice in many circumstances– as representative of synesis. Our proposal, which is based on the recognition of two functions of agreement, allows us to explain: a) why the free singular/plural alternation is not possible in all syntactic contexts; b) why it is possible in Spanish to find quantifiers agreeing at the supranominal level; c) why the distributive interpretation of a sentence is not necessarily at odds with the fact that the verb agrees with the quantifying noun within the subject nominal phrase in the singular, and not with the one preceded by de, which informs about the class or the identity of the referent.