At school, I did a Chinese-English translation assignment and translated one of the sentences into English as follows:
He is always willing to take on whatever task assigned to him.
And my teacher changed "whatever" to "any" as in:
He is always willing to take on any task assigned to him.
I asked a friend who is a native-speaker of English for advice, and he said I could use "whatever" as long as I also used "is" behind "task":
He is willing to take on whatever task is assigned to him.
I understand that "whatever" can be a conjunction, a pronoun, and a determiner. It seems that my friend treats "whatever task is assigned to him" as a noun clause that functions as the object of preposition "on."
I can understand this explanation.
However, my question lies in whether it is proper to use "whatever" as a determiner in this sentence. I know that both "any" and "whatever" can be determiners. When analyzing a sentence like "He is always willing to take on any task assigned to him," I think that the noun phrase "any task" is modified by a reduced adjective clause:
He is always willing to take on any task (which/that is) assigned to him.
If my reasoning stands, I can use "whatever" as a determiner before the noun "task" and use a reduced adjective clause to modify the noun phrase "whatever task":
He is always willing to take on whatever task (which/that is) assigned to him.
Is my reasoning correct? I would appreciate it very much if you can tell me what you think. Thank you!
Best Answer
I agree with your friend.
Suppose we reorganised the sentence, like this:
This shows more clearly that any and whatever don't function the same way in the sentence. Sentence 1 is correct, on the assumption that any is an adjective referring back to the tasks. It is a shortened version of:
Note that if we expand the sentence we can't just add "is". We need to add "which is". Any does not have the function of a relative pronoun in the sentence.
But sentence 2 is not correct. In sentence 2 we need to say, "whatever is assigned to him." Whatever functions now as a relative pronoun. It too refers to the tasks, but it is linking to a new clause that needs a verb. Sentence 2 is wrong for the same reason that the next example would be wrong, if the (bracketed) verb was missing in the relative clause.