Despite Article 68(3) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) granting victims an autonomous standing in proceedings, victims’ participatory rights have often been tailored to fit within the retributive structure of the trials. This contribution aims to provide a different perspective on victims’ role and their narratives in proceedings at the ICC, building upon the expressivist model of international criminal justice and focusing on a specific strand that engages with the adjudication process’s performative and communicative features. In providing a better understanding of how victims’ narrative unfolds in trials at the ICC, the article addresses two issues: how the concept of the victim is constructed at the ICC; and whether and, eventually, how this construct impedes progress in recognizing their narratives in proceedings at the ICC. Concerning the first issue, drawing on criminologist Nils Christie’s theorizing of the ‘ideal victim’, it will be observed that the construct of victims in proceedings at the ICC reflects three main attributes: weakness; innocence; and dependency. The second issue shed light on the extent to which the emphasis on the ‘ideal victim’ can serve as a tool in the hands of institutional actors at the ICC to pre-empt, constrain and subordinate victims’ narratives, in a manner that oversimplifies victimhood. To impose a particular narrative upon victims’ experiences, three main procedural mechanisms have been identified: appropriation of victims’ interests; legal representation of abstract victimhood; and exclusion from the trial of victims who do not conform to the ideal victim.

Knowledge-based AI typically depends on a knowledge engineer to construct a formal model of domain knowledge – but what if domain experts could do this themselves? This paper describes an extension to the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard, called Constraint Decision Model and Notation (cDMN). DMN is a user-friendly, table-based notation for decision logic, which allows domain experts to model simple decision procedures without the help of IT staff. cDMN aims to enlarge the expressiveness of DMN in order to model more complex domain knowledge, while retaining DMNs goal of being understandable by domain experts. We test cDMN by solving the most complex challenges posted on the DM Community website. We compare our own cDMN solutions to the solutions that have been submitted to the website and find that our approach is competitive. Moreover, cDMN is able to solve more challenges than any other approach.

Words and phrases may differ in the extent to which they are susceptible to prosodic foregrounding and expressive morphology: their expressiveness. They may also differ in the degree to which they are integrated in the morphosyntactic structure of the utterance: their grammatical integration. We describe an inverse relation that holds across widely varied languages, such that more expressiveness goes together with less grammatical integration, and vice versa. We review typological evidence for this inverse relation in ten spoken languages, then quantify and explain it using Japanese corpus data. We do this by tracking ideophones – vivid sensory words also known as mimetics or expressives – across different morphosyntactic contexts and measuring their expressiveness in terms of intonation, phonation and expressive morphology. We find that as expressiveness increases, grammatical integration decreases. Using gesture as a measure independent of the speech signal, we find that the most expressive ideophones are most likely to come together with iconic gestures. We argue that the ultimate cause is the encounter of two distinct and partly incommensurable modes of representation: the gradient, iconic, depictive system represented by ideophones and iconic gestures, and the discrete, arbitrary, descriptive system represented by ordinary words. The study shows how people combine modes of representation in speech and demonstrates the value of integrating description and depiction into the scientific vision of language.

People can be classified as attracted to both sexes, to men, to women, or to neither sex, and also as instrumental-expressive, instrumental, expressive, or non-instrumental-expressive. The two hypotheses tested herein are, on the one hand, the relative independence between these two typologies and, on the other, the close relation between sexual dimorphism and sexual attraction, in contrast to the relative independence between sexual dimorphism and the instrumental and expressive domains. A total of 503 university students (284 women and 219 men) completed two assessment instruments: The Sexual Attraction Questionnaire (SAQ) and the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI, 12 items). Analysis of contingency tables was performed. The results provide empirical support for the hypothesis of independence of the two typologies, solid support for the relation between sexual dimorphism and sexual attraction, and clear support for the independence between the gender domains and sexual dimorphism. The implications of these data for the different outlooks concerning the relations between sex and gender are established.

Sexual attraction is an essential part of sex, just as the instrumental and expressive traits are the mainstay of gender. Various hypotheses concerning the dimensionality and independence versus dependence/overlapping of these core entities were tested. A group of 423 university students completed the Sexual Attraction Questionnaire (SAQ; Fernández, Quiroga, & Rodríguez, 2006) and the 12-item Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974). Internal consistency and factor analyses (PAF) were conducted. The results support the dimensionality established for the SAQ and reveal some psychometric and conceptual weaknesses of the 12-item BSRI. The results also support the independence of the two cores: sexual attraction and the instrumental and expressive traits. The logical implications for the different viewpoints of the relations between sex and gender are discussed.