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Restricted languages

First-order logic can be studied in languages with fewer logical symbols than were described above:

Restrictions such as these are useful as a technique to reduce the number of inference rules or axiom schemas in deductive systems, which leads to shorter proofs of metalogical results. The cost of the restrictions is that it becomes more difficult to express natural-language statements in the formal system at hand, because the logical connectives used in the natural language statements must be replaced by their (longer) definitions in terms of the restricted collection of logical connectives. Similarly, derivations in the limited systems may be longer than derivations in systems that include additional connectives. There is thus a trade-off between the ease of working within the formal system and the ease of proving results about the formal system.

It is also possible to restrict the arities of function symbols and predicate symbols, in sufficiently expressive theories. One can in principle dispense entirely with functions of arity greater than 2 and predicates of arity greater than 1 in theories that include a pairing function. This is a function of arity 2 that takes pairs of elements of the domain and returns an ordered pair containing them. It is also sufficient to have two predicate symbols of arity 2 that define projection functions from an ordered pair to its components. In either case it is necessary that the natural axioms for a pairing function and its projections are satisfied.