Paper 3, Section II, I
Explain what is meant by a structure for a first-order signature , and describe briefly how first-order terms and formulae in the language over are interpreted in a structure. Suppose that and are -structures, and that is a conjunction of atomic formulae over : show that an -tuple belongs to the interpretation of in if and only if and .
A first-order theory is called regular if its axioms all have the form
where and are (possibly empty) strings of variables and and are conjunctions of atomic formulae (possibly the empty conjunction ). Show that if and are models of a regular theory , then so is .
Now suppose that is a regular theory, and that a sentence of the form
is derivable from the axioms of , where and the are conjunctions of atomic formulae. Show that the sentence is derivable for some . [Hint: Suppose not, and use the Completeness Theorem to obtain a suitable family of -models .]