Quantifiers and congruence closure (Q1300006)

The authors investigate the expressive power of quantifiers on finite structures. They introduce the notion of bounded quantifiers and show that each relativizing quantifier which is bounded is first-order definable. They define meager quantifiers and show that no proper extension of first-order logic by means of meager quantifiers is weakly congruence-closed. They investigate the full congruence closure property and show that it fails in proper extensions of first-order logics by means of meager quantifiers, monadic quantifiers, and the Härtig quantifier.