Preservation under Substructures modulo Bounded Cores

We investigate a model-theoretic property that generalizes the classical notion of “preservation under substructures”. We call this property preservation under substructures modulo bounded cores, and present a syntactic characterization via Σ02 sentences for properties of arbitrary structures definable by FO sentences. As a sharper characterization, we further show that the count of existential quantifiers in the Σ02 sentence equals the size of the smallest bounded core. We also present our results on the sharper characterization for special fragments of FO and also over special classes of structures. We present a (not FO-definable) class of finite structures for which the sharper characterization fails, but for which the classical Łoś-Tarski preservation theorem holds. As a fallout of our studies, we obtain combinatorial proofs of the Łoś-Tarski theorem for some of the aforementioned cases.