Abstract
This paper introduces an abstract notion of fragments of monadic second-order logic. This concept is based on purely syntactic closure properties. We show that over finite words, every logical fragment defines a lattice of languages with certain closure properties. Among these closure properties are residuals and inverse \(\mathcal C\)-morphisms. Here, depending on certain closure properties of the fragment, \(\mathcal C\) is the family of arbitrary, non-erasing, length-preserving, length-multiplying, or lengthreducing morphisms. In particular, definability in a certain fragment can often be characterized in terms of the syntactic morphism. This work extends a result of Straubing in which he investigated certain restrictions of first-order formulae.
As motivating examples, we present (1) a fragment which captures the stutter-invariant part of piecewise-testable languages and (2) an acyclic fragment of Σ2. As it turns out, the latter has the same expressive power as two-variable first-order logic FO2.
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Kufleitner, M., Lauser, A. (2012). Lattices of Logical Fragments over Words. In: Czumaj, A., Mehlhorn, K., Pitts, A., Wattenhofer, R. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7392. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31585-5_27
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