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I have a question about the usage of "in." Could you please explain the use of "in" in the following sentence? I don't think "what" takes a preposition, so how is "in" being used here? Why "in" is grammatically needed ? The following is an excerpt from an article in The Guardian enter link description here:

Prince Harry, who is training to become an army air corps helicopter pilot, served on the frontline in Afghanistan last year in what was widely seen as a public relations triumph for him and the British army.

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  • That reads naturally to me. I take in as relating to the rest of the sentence as a whole. In other words, Prince Harry's service was part of (hence in) the public relations triumph.
    – Peter Kirkpatrick
    Commented Jul 11 at 22:43
  • It's a metaphoric usage whereby the "public relations triumph" is seen as container for Prince Harry's exploits. You can throw out completely optional what was widely seen as to see the essential remaining syntax more clearly.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jul 11 at 22:46
  • Thank you for the comments! Is ‘in’ grammatically necessary here?
    – Japanese English teacher
    Commented Jul 12 at 0:53
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    Like I said, you can throw out what was widely seen as to simplify. Further simplifying distracting irrelevancies, you're left with He served abroad in a public relations triumph. Obviously some kind of preposition is syntactically necessary, but it could certainly be changed from in to as. Note that as more strongly implies that his primary reason for serving was the pursuit of favourable PR, where in tends to suggest things just turned out that way.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jul 12 at 2:18

3 Answers 3

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"What" is a noun. Almost any noun can be the object of a preposition. In this case, what was Prince Harry's service? It was "what was a public relations triumph". I guess the writer could have made the sentence more concise by dropping the "what was" and just saying, "in a public relations triumph". But the "what was" adds some emphasis.

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"What" is also a pronoun..
I refer to OP's sentence:

I don't think "what" takes a preposition, so how is "in" being used here? Why "in" is grammatically needed ?

"in what" may mean "that which".
Ref. Discussion - https://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/in-what-vs-in-which.120759/

What part of speech is "what" ?

Ref. partofspeech.org.
In English texts and verbal communication, the word what also has various functions. It can be used as a adjective, an adverb, a pronoun, or an interjection.
Pronoun..
The word “what” is also normally categorized as a pronoun if it is used for asking questions about something or if it is used to substitute a noun. For example, in the sentence below:
What we need is commitment.
This “what” word is classified under pronouns because it replaces a thing or a noun.

So in the sentence "what" is a pronoun and object of preposition "in"

Ref. https://www.edulyte.com/english/object-of-a-preposition/#:~:text=The%20object%20of%20a%20preposition%20is%20the%20noun%20or%20pronoun,serving%20as%20a%20unified%20entity.
The object of a preposition is the noun or pronoun that comes after it and demonstrates its connection to the rest of the sentence. Two kinds of objects exist: noun objects, which can be singular words or word groups acting as nouns, and clause objects, which are complete clauses serving as a unified entity. Noun objects offer precise significance to the preposition, whereas clause objects contribute supplementary details or explanations.
Here are a few interesting examples:
I’m interested in what she said.

Sentence in the OP

Prince Harry, who is training to become an army air corps helicopter pilot, served on the frontline in Afghanistan last year in what was widely seen as a public relations triumph for him and the British army.

Here the word "what" is acting as a relative pronoun (replacing the noun phrase) and is the object of the preposition "in"

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I don't think "what" takes a preposition, so how is "in" being used here?

There is too much focus on "what" here (in both the question and answers).

English moves from left to right, so that a word/phrase generally "takes" (or selects) the word/phrase to its right. So the question is not what does "what" take, it's what does "in" take. The preposition "in" generally takes a noun/noun phrase as it's object, whether it be the pronoun "what" or (if you omit the excess words) the noun phrase "a triumph".

Prince Harry served on the frontline, in a triumph for him and the army.

One use of a prepositional phrase is "adverbially", to describe the action of the verb. Here, "in a triumph" describes the Prince's service, that it was characterised by being triumphant, or resulted ... in a triumph.

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