In the effort to deliver the American press from a “death spiral,” advocates often fall back on describing the press function. It is generally explained as a matter of legal doctrine (what the Supreme Court says the press does) and political theory (that a free press is central to democracy). But advocates should also conceptualize the function as a matter of rhetoric. How advocates describe the press’s work can change the degree to which the public cares about that work. In this era of crisis and distraction, that caring is key to preserving and even reimagining the press. This essay describes how press advocates can use rhetoric as a framework to rename press functions and imagine new ones in service of a dynamic and invigorated press.

This chapter explores the fundamental aspects of property law in China, emphasising its reach and function as a socially constructed concept. It begins by defining the scope of property law and its significance in a socialist-transitioning China, where property is seen not just as a tangible asset but as a relationship between individuals and society. It delves into the historical development of property law, tracing changes from ancient times through the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the subsequent legal reforms.

The chapter also examines the constitutional property clause, highlighting amendments that have progressively recognised and protected private property rights. It discusses significant rural land reforms, focusing on the transition from collective to more individualised land use rights and the implications for agricultural productivity and social stability. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the protection of property rights, outlining legal mechanisms for the enforcement and safeguarding of these rights.

Neuromuscular disorders cause respiratory failure when they significantly impair the respiratory muscle pump. This is a complex system involving the diaphragm, intercostal, neck, shoulder girdle, abdominal wall and possibly paraspinal muscles. The dilator muscles of the palate, pharynx and larynx maintain a patent airway and air conduit. The diaphragm is the main muscle of inspiration, but is aided by the parasternal intercostals, and additionally by the accessory respiratory muscles in forceful inspiration, diaphragmatic weakness or compromised diaphragmatic function as is the case in lung emphysema. Exhalation is passive, but forceful expiration and cough require the abdominal wall and a portion of the intercostals. This chapter focuses on the physiology of the muscles involved in respiration, and the recognition of developing neuromuscular respiratory failure, its clinical evaluation and assessment, and basic principles of management.

As stylistics developed, it became increasingly clear that a purely formalist approach to identifying elements of style would not be adequate for explicating the functions of particular textual choices. Consequently, stylisticians began to integrate insights from linguistics concerning the relationship between form and function, paying ever greater attention to the role of context in the interpretative process. This chapter traces the development of stylistics from its origins as an application of linguistics to (mainly literary) texts, informed by concepts from Russian formalism, to a fully formed subdiscipline of linguistics as it began to draw on these functional approaches to language description and developed more of its own theories and analytical frameworks.

Some people appear to learn more slowly. Could they just be learning different things? Suppose two groups of children are learning words – they have growing vocabularies – but one group acquires the list more slowly than the other. Can we use the structure of the information they learn to gain insight into whether or not they are learning different information? Small worlds are one way of measuring the structure of a community. When quantitatively defined, small worlds have a number of useful properties, including that they compare the structure of a network relative to different versions of itself, thereby providing a kind of ‘control’ network against which to benchmark a measurement. In this chapter, I discuss small worlds and several ways to evaluate them, and then use them to answer a simple question: Are children who learn to talk late just slow versions of early talkers? Or are they learning something different about the world? Along the way, I will enumerate three different approaches to explaining where structure comes from: function, formation, and emulation.

The Introduction explains the relevance of a theoretical inquiry into the purpose and function of belligerent reprisals. It highlights several examples in recent practice where the vocabulary of belligerent reprisals has been harnessed by parties to an armed conflict, pointing to the continued relevance of the institution in contemporary warfare. At the same time, it outlines persisting difficulties in the terminology, regulation and governance of reprisals, and shows that they all derive from the failure by international legal theory to give a proper legal vest to the purpose and function of the mechanism. It points to fundamental fallacies both in how the question has been approached, and in how it has been answered. It proposes an alternative to existing accounts and outlines how it will be investigated in the book.

The proportion of the population living into old age has been increasing worldwide. For the first time in history, there are more older people than children under 5 years of age. The task for public health is to understand the relationships between ageing, health and the environment (physical, social and economic) in which people live, to promote healthy ageing and prevent the disability and subsequent dependency that is often associated with growing old.

This chapter examines the factors that lead to ageing populations and explores the health, social and economic consequences of the change in the population structure. It then goes on to outline strategies that can lead to healthy ageing and other public health actions that could help to manage the challenges posed – and the opportunities afforded – by the relative and absolute increase in the number of older people.

Informal borrowings are used for several reasons. They are used to name things, providing alternative synonyms for things already named in English but also names for things yet to be named. More often, however, they are used instead of standard English to communicate additional information that is social, psychological, rhetorical, or cultural in nature. The social function involves group solidarity and social distancing. The psychological function includes expression of emotions via a repertoire of expressions for a variety of emotional states and emotive labels. The rhetorical function includes informality, conciseness, forcefulness, wordplay, and small talk. The cultural function involves expressing cultural identity and stylization; while expressing cultural identity is often the reason for using such expressions, stylization is another phenomenon accounting for their common use among larger segments of American society.

Aristotle has the resources to solve the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness and thus to vouchsafe the necessity of ethically virtuous activity while clarifying the kind of priority that contemplation has. Among these resources is his theory of predication as articulated in the Organon, his toolkit for all sorts of philosophical inquiry. This theory allows us to understand the coherence of what have appeared to many to be fundamentally discrepant answers to the question about what kind of activity happiness is.

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle allowed and argued for the possibility that all human lives have some non-instrumental value. This valuation of life is premised on his teleological conception of nature: insofar as all human lives are natural ends of some sort, they are thus a good. However, this non-instrumental value of mere living is in itself not sufficient to make a life worth living. As in Plato, whether a life is lived well or badly is the decisive factor, and again the state of virtue or vice is the most important consideration. Vice makes a life worse than death, regardless of the other good things in it, but fully fledged virtue is not necessary for a life worth living. In contrast to those who are fully virtuous, other non-vicious humans may need other goods, or at least freedom from other bads, such as serious illness or grave misfortunes, to pass the threshold of a life worth living. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle is less optimistic about the chances of the non-educated elite having a life worth living, though he does not flatly deny that possibility.

Focusing on the Republic, this chapter argues that Plato regards psychological health, or the virtue of justice, as the necessary – and sufficient – condition of a human life worth living. This healthy condition amounts to a good exercise of soul’s function (ergon), which is premised on a good exercise of an individual’s function, or job, in the city. This account allows even peasants or craftsman in Plato’s ideal city to have a life worth living, even though they fall short of the best possible human life lived by the rulers-philosophers. It is argued that this non-elitist account of a life worth living is compatible with the famous claim from Plato’s Apology that an unexamined life is not worth living for humans. For in the ideal city all citizens live an examined life, at the very least in the sense of being ruled by the wise philosophers. At the same time, Plato decisively denied the possibility that the mere fact of being alive, or the fact of having a soul, would be a good. It can be a good, if a life is lived well, or it can be an evil, if a life is lived badly.