Local Goldblatt—Thomason theorem.

The celebrated theorem proved by Goldblatt and Thomason in 1974 gives necessary and sufficient conditions for an elementary class of Kripke frames to be modally definable. Here we obtain a local analogue of this result, which deals with modal definability of classes of pointed frames. Furthermore, we generalize it to the case of n-frames, which are frames with n distinguished worlds. For talking about n-frames, we generalize modal formulas to modal expressions. While a modal formula is evaluated at a single world of a model, a modal expression with n individual variables is evaluated at an n-tuple of worlds, just as a first-order formula with n free variables. We introduce operations on n-frames that preserve validity of modal expressions, and show that closure under these operations is a necessary and sufficient condition for an elementary class of n-frames to be modally definable. We also discuss the relationship between modal expressions and hybrid logic and leave open questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]