English

On the expressive power of inquisitive team logic and inquisitive first-order logic

Logic 2026-03-10 v1 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

Inquisitive team logic is a variant of inquisitive logic interpreted in team semantics, which has been argued to provide a natural setting for the regimentation of dependence claims. With respect to sentences, this logic is known to be expressively equivalent with first-order logic. In this article we show that, on the contrary, the expressive power of open formulas in this logic properly exceeds that of first-order logic. On the way to this result, we show that if inquisitive team logic is extended with the range-generating universal quantifier adopted in dependence logic, the resulting logic can express finiteness, and as a consequence, it is neither compact nor recursively axiomatizable. We further extend our results to standard inquisitive first-order logic, showing that some sentences of this logic express non first-order properties of models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.08646,
  title  = {On the expressive power of inquisitive team logic and inquisitive first-order logic},
  author = {Juha Kontinen and Ivano Ciardelli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08646},
  year   = {2026}
}