We develop a theory of Tannakian Galois groups for t-motives and relate this
to the theory of Frobenius semilinear difference equations. We show that the
transcendence degree of the period matrix associated to a given t-motive is
equal to the dimension of its Galois group. Using this result we prove that
Carlitz logarithms of algebraic functions that are linearly independent over
the rational function field are algebraically independent.Comment: 39 page