ON SECOND-ORDER CHARACTERIZABILITY

Abstract. We investigate the extent of second order characterizable structures by extending Shelah’s Main Gap dichotomy to second order logic. For this end we consider a countable complete first order theory T. We show that all sufficiently large models of T have a characterization up to isomorphism in the extension of second order logic obtained by adding a little bit of infinitary logic if and only if T is shallow superstable with NDOP and NOTOP. Our result relies on cardinal arithmetic assumptions. Under weaker assumptions we get consistency results or alternatively results about second order logic with Henkin semantics. Content