Abstract

The Feferman–Vaught theorem provides a way of evaluating a first order sentence \(\varphi \) on a disjoint union of structures by producing a decomposition of \(\varphi \) into sentences which can be evaluated on the individual structures and the results of these evaluations combined using a propositional formula. This decomposition can in general be non-elementarily larger than \(\varphi \). We introduce a “tree” generalization of the prenex normal form (PNF) for first order sentences, and show that for an input sentence in this form having a fixed number of quantifier alternations, a Feferman–Vaught decomposition can be obtained in time elementary in the size of the sentence. The sentences in the decomposition are also in tree PNF, and further have the same number of quantifier alternations and the same quantifier rank as the input sentence. We extend this result by considering binary operations other than disjoint union, in particular sum-like operations such as join, ordered sum and NLC-sum, that are definable using quantifier-free translation schemes.