On Boolean closed full trios and rational Kripke frames.

Abstract

A Boolean closed full trio is a class of languages that is closed under the Boolean operations (union, intersection, and complementation) and rational transductions. It is well-known that the regular languages constitute such a Boolean closed full trio. It is shown here that every such language class that contains any non-regular language already includes the whole arithmetical hierarchy (and even the one relative to this language). A consequence of this result is that aside from the regular languages, no full trio generated by one language is closed under complementation. Our construction also shows that there is a fixed rational Kripke frame such that assigning an arbitrary non-regular language to some variable allows the definition of any language from the arithmetical hierarchy in the corresponding Kripke structure using multimodal logic.