Singular noun + "or" + plural noun as a single unit

Question

In a technical book, I have stumbled upon the following sentence:

Here, resource-specification is a statement or statements that declares and initializes a resource.

I'm a bit confused about how the verbs declares and initializes are used here. Their form (third person singular) assumes that they are linked to a singular noun. But can statement or statements really be treated as some sort of a compound singular noun?

In other words, is everything correct with the example above, or one should modify it in some way to make it more grammatically consistent?

Answer 1

Weeellll, an argument could be made that the sentence should read like this:

Here, resource-specification is a statement or statements that declare and initialize a resource.

One noun is singular and the other is plural. In these cases, the verb should agree in number with the noun that is closest, e.g. statements (plural) not statement (singular).