If Your Partner Turns Out To Be A Tyrant Analysis

“If your partner turns out to be a tyrant.” is the slogan of the Swiss FRAUENZENTRALE CARIOCA STUDIO & CGI campaign. The campaign portrays women with their partner exactly like the well-known historic dictators Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin and Muammar al-Gaddafi. It is a campaign to raise awareness of domestic violence. This provocative comparison is made because “every two weeks, a woman in Switzerland dies as a result of domestic violence.” which is mentioned below the main sentences. I did only chose this sentences because of this important message but because it caught my attention because of the sentences structure. Reading the sentence “if your partner turns out to be a tyrant.” Seems to implie a result or a sentence to complete it
The reason therefore is that the sentences includes two lexical verbs - “turns out” as the lexical verb of the main clause and “be” as the lexical verb. Starting with the second clause which is an infinitive clause because of the “to be”, “be” is taken as the head of the VP. In this case “to be” represents a two-place-predicate (transitive) and therefore needs an object and a subject. Because “be is the head of the VP it “is the item that selects and projects” ( p.15 class11 Dr. agnieskwa Ewa Tytus) So it takes the Determiner Phrase (DP) of “a tyrant” as a complement to form V’. “A tyrant” is the object which is indicated in the sign <1,2˃. The DP is a result of the determiner “a” which has an [NP] feature and therefore must be merged with the Nominal Phrase (NP) of “tyrant”. After forming the V’ usually a specifier is added to form a VP and to add the subject to the sentence but in this case the “apparently subjectless infinitive clauses contain an understood null subject” (Introduction to linguistics buch p.276). Since the null subject has in a way the “same grammatically properties as pronouns” ( p.276) the empty VP is filled with a PRO. Covert PRO subject??. A T as a new head is added which needs a verb therefore it carries the selectional VP feature and merges with the VP to T’. The T carries the tense which in this is case is “to”. “To” marks the tense even
The following clause will have the same structure as the clause before. So, the two-place predicate “turns out” takes the CP of the infinitive clause as a complement and those merge to V’. This time as a specifier serves “your partner” because it is the subject of the sentence. It merges with the V’ to VP. Another head is added again, which is the T. The T carries the [VP]-feature which means that it merges with VP to T’. The T also carries the tense feature [present] because “turns out” is in the present tense and this feature determines the tense of the TP. Lastly the T carries the [*EPP]-feature which makes the specifier “your partner” move to the specifier position of the TP. “Your partner” leaves a trace in the specifier position of VP. In its new position, it merges with T’ to TP. As a last step, C as a head is added which carries the [TP]-feature so C can merge with TP to C’. It also is inheriting the [decl]-feature because even though it seems that “if” indicates an interrogative it is a synonym of “assuming that” or “whenever”. Thus, “if” is added to the C-head position. Finally, the C carries also a [top]-feature. Per that the Specifier position of the CP (Spec-CP) is filled with a declarative operator Op. To complete the sentence the declarative operator Op and C’ merge to