A note on the submodel preservation property in fragments of first-order logic

Abstract

This note contains some material promised in our earlier papers on submodel preservation and the guarded fragment, along with some information on the current status of the problems mentioned in these papers. Section 1 contains an early example of failure of Los-Tarski for finite-variable fragments with binary relations from a 1992 manuscript, with no substantial change of content. For further background to this example, Section 2 surveys a number of results concerning the submodel preservation property for various fragments of first-order logic.