My question is as the title says: Is it allowed for a pronoun and its referent to have different plurality? A specific example I am considering is a sentence like this:
I love this cookie so much that I bought dozens of them and distributed them to my friends.
I am curious whether this kind of sentence is grammatically correct or not.
Hmm... Did you consider that "them"'s referrent might be unexpressed? Them refers not to cookie, but to "cookies", the plural form of the noun expressed in the sentence and whose existence is implied.
Not all pronouns belong to nouns that are expressed elsewhere in the sentence. "Are they going to help?" "They" is all by itself. Or try: "The man called and said that they would fix everything." "They" does not mean "man". It means some men/workers at the company.
I can also assure you that "cookie" here is not collective. If it read family: "I love this family so much that I hugged all of them". "All" quite obviously, and ridiculously, pretends to mean all families, not all members of this particular family.
I think some people here missed this, hiding in plain sight.
One more thing is that, a hundred years ago, is was perfectly common to just use the singular: "I like this cookie so much that I bought dozens of it..." Nowadays this sounds kind of stilted, but it's probably better English.
Your example sounds just fine to my ear, but if I replace the subject and verb in the sentence, I can create a less acceptable sentence, such as:
Or, even more absurd sounding:
The absurdity owes to the pronoun-antecedent disagreement, and, in looking at these two examples, my rationale for the discordance is this:
The antecedent-pronoun disagreement is more pronounced in cases where there is a low degree of (or no) fungibility in the antecedent. That is, in cases where the antecedent is not interchangeable--there is only one Michael Jordan, therefore Michael Jordan is not fungible. Fungibility, then, is not a grammatical necessity, but an issue of euphony.
Here's another example with an entirely fungible antecedent:
Since the dollar holds no singular significance, it's very easy for us to see it as one or as many just like it.
However, when the antecedent becomes less fungible, when it draws up a more distinct person or thing, it can no longer be lumped in with others just like it without a stretch of the imagination. Here are some examples of antecedents and pronouns that become increasingly less fungible. See if you start to hear where the antecedent-pronoun discordance comes into play.
I've been looking for something authoritative to support or negate your example sentence, but I haven't found anything yet. I'll update if I do. For now, I think your best bet is to run some sample pronoun-antecedents through whatever sentence structure you've got and see where the disagreement becomes too discordant to use. I suspect it will occur at that point where the fungibility goes away.
In general, a plural pronoun should go with a plural referent. However, there are a number of exceptions to this rule, and I believe this is one of them.
In particular, you can use a number of them, dozens of them, hundreds of them, many of them, and so on with a singular referent. Consider the following sentences, all taken from the internet (found by searching "but dozens/hundreds of them").
I know of an orchard which is suffering for want of cultivation ; and not only one, but scores of them.
Take the new trend in which high schools are naming not one valedictorian but dozens of them.
He wasn't just raising enough for one wheelchair, but dozens of them.
Top athletes don't share a single talent gene, but hundreds of them.
There's not just one layer of mudcracks, but hundreds of them.
You may not have heard of a beefalo, but hundreds of them are causing trouble in America's Grand Canyon.
I don't think there is anything wrong with any of these sentences.
The problem, I think, is not so much in the disagreement (or not) in number, as in the reversal of sequence in the verb tenses and the misuse of "this"
You like this particular instance, not the abstract collective "type" of cookie. "Like" is in the present tense, and this cookie means the cookie that is present; i.e. here, now, in front of you (maybe even in your hand—or the part of it you haven't eaten yet, anyway). <-- oops, an ambiguous pronoun reference !
But this reverses cause and effect—it says that a present situation caused a past event. This is impossible. So the speaker must have tasted the cookie, and then later bought "dozens".
The proper temporal and causal sequence, and a possible solution to the pronoun problem could be expressed as
The question of pronoun matching number of its referent is not a serious problem, for various simple and esoteric reasons, as others have explained.
Yet, there is an elegant solution, least awkward of all, which you already see above: the bracketed words aren't just a choice of which is needed; they are all entirely optional—and are better left out. Due to the semantics of the causal so much that, there is no doubt as to what you bought dozens of (cookies) nor of which kind (the kind that you previosly tasted and liked.)
