We give a new general definition of arity, yielding the companion notions of
signature and associated syntax. This setting is modular in the sense requested
by Ghani and Uustalu: merging two extensions of syntax corresponds to building
an amalgamated sum. These signatures are too general in the sense that we are
not able to prove the existence of an associated syntax in this general
context. So we have to select arities and signatures for which there exists the
desired initial monad. For this, we follow a track opened by Matthes and
Uustalu: we introduce a notion of strengthened arity and prove that the
corresponding signatures have initial semantics (i.e. associated syntax). Our
strengthened arities admit colimits, which allows the treatment of the
\lambda-calculus with explicit substitution.Comment: In Proceedings FICS 2012, arXiv:1202.317
