On the Expressive Power of Inquisitive Team Logic and Inquisitive First-Order Logic

Juha Kontinen
(University of Helsinki)
Ivano Ciardelli
(University of Padua)

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; as a consequence, this logic is not compact and has non-arithmetic complexity. 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, thus settling an open problem from the literature.

In Marta Bílková, Malvin Gattinger, Iris van der Giessen, Marianna Girlando and Yanjing Wang: Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Advances in Modal Logic (AiML 2026), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 29-06-2026, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 447, pp. 552–566.
Published: 29th June 2026.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.447.31 bibtex PDF
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