We study the first-order theories of some natural and important classes of coloured trees, including the four classes of trees whose paths have the order type respectively of the natural numbers, the integers, the rationals, and the reals. We develop a technique for approximating a tree as a suitably coloured linear order. We then present the first-order theories of certain classes of coloured linear orders and use them, along with the approximating technique, to establish complete axiomatisations of the four classes (...) of trees mentioned above. (shrink)

A maximal chain in a tree is called a path, and a tree is called bounded when all its paths contain leaves. This paper concerns itself with first-order theories of bounded trees. We establish some sufficient conditions for the existence of bounded end-extensions that are also partial elementary extensions of a given tree. As an application of tree boundedness, we obtain a conditional axiomatisation of the first-order theory of the class of trees whose paths are all isomorphic to some ordinal (...) \, given the first-order theories of certain classes of bounded trees. (shrink)