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Do you agree?

1 He was appointed leader of the project.

1a He was appointed as leader of the project.

Correct.

2 He was appointed the leader of the project.

2a He was appointed as the leader of the project.

Wrong.

3 He was assigned the leader of the project.

3a He was appointed as the leader of the project.

Correct.

And finally, is there a difference between:

He was appointed leader of the project.

and

He was assigned (as) the leader of the project.

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4
  • 1
    Assign is not the right verb in this context. You can say He was assigned the task of leading the project or He was assigned to lead the project (the task was given to him), but assigned (the) leader doesn't sound right. Unless the leader was another person who was assigned to 'him' in some kind of partnership.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Mar 16 at 9:35
  • @KateBunting Agreed, or you could say "He was assigned to the leadership of the project".
    – Peter Jennings
    Commented Mar 16 at 14:05
  • 1
    2a and 3a are the same so how can one be wrong and the other correct?
    – Stuart F
    Commented Mar 19 at 19:51
  • Many of these verbs (name, nominate, appoint, etc) accept as catenative complement either the {ROLE NOUN} or a prepositional phrase headed by "as": "as {ROLE-NOUN}".
    – TimR
    Commented Aug 15 at 22:59

1 Answer 1

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1 is a contracted form of 1a, and 2 is a contracted form of 2a. All of those are valid enough, but using the contracted forms would be more informal/spoken.

"He was assigned as the leader of the project" is just about acceptable in some contexts, but would mostly sound strange, because it would only make sense as a contracted form of something like "He was assigned [a role] as the leader of the project".

It never makes sense in this context to say "he was assigned the leader" because, as the comments say, that would imply that he's being assigned someone who is a leader, like he has to take responsibiliy for them. The correction for that would be to refer to the correct thing being assigned, which could be "the leadership of.." or "the leader role in..", or more commonly "the leadership role in..".

The key difference is that "role" is the noun and "leader" or "leadership" are the adjectives.

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