Stationarily ordered types and the number of countable models

Abstract

We introduce the notions of stationarily ordered types and theories; the latter generalizes weak o-minimality and the former is a relaxed version of weak o-minimality localized at the locus of a single type. We show that forking, as a binary relation on elements realizing stationarily ordered types, is an equivalence relation and that each stationarily ordered type in a model determines some order-type as an invariant of the model. We study weak and forking non-orthogonality of stationarily ordered types, show that they are equivalence relations and prove that invariants of non-orthogonal types are closely related. The techniques developed are applied to prove that in the case of a binary, stationarily ordered theory with fewer than 2ℵ0 countable models, the isomorphism type of a countable model is determined by a certain sequence of invariants of the model. In particular, we confirm Vaught's conjecture for binary, stationarily ordered theories.