Rudimentary languages and second-order logic

The aim of this paper is to point out the equivalence between three notions respectively issued from recursion theory, computational complexity and finite model theory. One the one hand, the rudimentary languages are known to be characterized by the linear hierarchy. On the other hand, this complexity class can be proved to correspond to monadic second-order logic with addition. Our viewpoint sheds some new light on the close connection between these domains: We bring together the two extremal notions by providing a direct logical characterization of rudimentary languages and a representation result of second-order logic into these languages. We use natural arithmetical tools, and our proofs contain no ingredient from computational complexity.