pronouns - Subject vs. Object marking for whoever?


I know similar questions have been asked before, but I'm having trouble reconciling the following sentence, received in an email:



Can we ask whomever is your contact there to email us a job so we can check backward compatibility?



I could understand using objective case if the sentence were "can we ask (him) to email...", but I get tripped up considering "whomever" to be the subject of "(he) is your contact there".



Answer



The part that tricked the original writer is that "whomever is your contact there" is a noun clause that is collectively the object of "can we ask...". The rule is that, in a situation like that, you're supposed to look inside the clause for your objective/subjective case, though, so actually the sentence should use "whoever", as you suspected.


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