Related papers: A note on the submodel preservation property in fr…
It is well known that the classic {\L}o\'s-Tarski preservation theorem fails in the finite: there are first-order definable classes of finite structures closed under extensions which are not definable (in the finite) in the existential…
Over the past two decades several fragments of first-order logic have been identified and shown to have good computational and algorithmic properties, to a great extent as a result of appropriately describing the image of the standard…
Lindstr\"om theorems characterize logics in terms of model-theoretic conditions such as Compactness and the L\"owenheim-Skolem property. Most existing characterizations of this kind concern extensions of first-order logic. But on the other…
We investigate a generalization of the {\L}o\'s-Tarski preservation theorem via the semantic notion of \emph{preservation under substructures modulo $k$-sized cores}. It was shown earlier that over arbitrary structures, this semantic notion…
We prove preservation theorems for $\mathcal{L}_{\omega_1, G}$, the countable fragment of Vaught's closed game logic. These are direct generalizations of the theorems of \L{}o\'s-Tarski (resp. Lyndon) on sentences of $\mathcal{L}_{\omega_1,…
We investigate a model-theoretic property that generalizes the classical notion of "preservation under substructures". We call this property \emph{preservation under substructures modulo bounded cores}, and present a syntactic…
This article gives a summary of the author's Ph.D. dissertation (arXiv:1609.06297). In addition to an overview of notions and results, it also provides sketches of various proofs and simplified presentations of certain abstract results of…
This paper investigates the expressiveness of a fragment of first-order sentences in Gaifman normal form, namely the positive Boolean combinations of basic local sentences. We show that they match exactly the first-order sentences preserved…
We revisit the work studying homomorphism preservation for first-order logic in sparse classes of structures initiated in [Atserias et al., JACM 2006] and [Dawar, JCSS 2010]. These established that first-order logic has the homomorphism…
We introduce a fragment of continuous first-order logic, analogue of Palyutin formulas (or h-formulas) in classical model theory, which is preserved under reduced products in both directions. We use it to extend classical results on…
Building on ideas of Gurevich and Shelah for the G\"odel Class, we present a new probabilistic proof of the finite model property for the Guarded Fragment of First-Order Logic. Our proof is conceptually simple and yields the optimal…
We present new preservation theorems that semantically characterize the $\exists^k \forall^*$ and $\forall^k \exists^*$ prefix classes of first order logic, for each natural number $k$. Unlike preservation theorems in the literature that…
We define the adjacent fragment AF of first-order logic, obtained by restricting the sequences of variables occurring as arguments in atomic formulas. The adjacent fragment generalizes (after a routine renaming) two-variable logic as well…
We study the satisfiability problem for the two-variable first-order logic over structures with one transitive relation. % We show that the problem is decidable in 2-NExpTime for the fragment consisting of formulas where existential…
We study first-order logic over unordered structures whose elements carry a finite number of data values from an infinite domain which can be compared wrt. equality. As the satisfiability problem for this logic is undecidable in general, in…
We study the expressive power of the two-variable fragment of order-invariant first-order logic. This logic departs from first-order logic in two ways: first, formulas are only allowed to quantify over two variables. Second, formulas can…
We introduce a notion of weak definability of first order structures, show that various classification-theoretic properties are or are not preserved under it, and that the properties which are preserved can also be characterized in terms of…
This paper is a contribution to graded model theory, in the context of mathematical fuzzy logic. We study characterizations of classes of graded structures in terms of the syntactic form of their first-order axiomatization. We focus on…
We explore new interactions between finite model theory and classical streams of universal algebra and semigroup theory. A key result is an example of finite algebras whose variety is not finitely axiomatisable in first order logic, but…
In this dissertation, we present for each natural number $k$, semantic characterizations of the $\exists^k \forall^*$ and $\forall^k \exists^*$ prefix classes of first order logic sentences, over all structures finite and infinite. This…