Products of two-sorted structures

Abstract

First order properties of direct products and direct sums (weak direct products) of relational systems have been studied extensively. For example, in Feferman and Vaught [3] an effective procedure is given for reducing such properties of the product to properties of the factors, and thus in particular elementary equivalence is preserved. We consider here two-sorted relational systems, with the direct product and sum operations keeping one of the sorts stationary. (See Feferman [4] for a similar definition of extensions.)These considerations are motivated by the example of direct products and sums of modules [8], [9]. In [9] examples are given to show that the direct product of two modules (even having only a finite number of module elements) does not preserve two-sorted (even universal) equivalence for any finite or infinitary language Lκ, λ. So we restrict attention here to direct powers and multiples (many copies of one structure). Also in [9] it is shown (for modules, but the proofs generalize immediately to two-sorted structures with a finite number of relations) that the direct multiple operation preserves first order ∀E-equivalence and the direct power operation preserves first order ∀-equivalence. We show here that these results for general two-sorted structures in a finite first order language are, in a sense, best-possible. Examples are given to show that does not imply , and that does not imply .