Abstract In the classical theory of regular languages, the concept of recognition by profinite monoids is an important tool. Beyond regularity, Boolean spaces with internal monoids (BiMs) were recently proposed as a generalization. On the other hand, fragments of logic defining regular languages can be studied inductively via the so-called “Substitution Principle.” In this paper, we make the logical underpinnings of this principle explicit and extend it to arbitrary languages using Stone duality. Subsequently, we show how it can be used to obtain topo-algebraic recognizers for classes of languages defined by a wide class of first-order logic fragments. This naturally leads to a notion of semidirect product of BiMs extending the classical such construction for profinite monoids. Our main result is a generalization of Almeida and Weil’s Decomposition Theorem for semidirect products from the profinite setting to that of BiMs. This is a crucial step in a program to extend the profinite methods of regular language theory to the setting of complexity theory.

In this paper we relate two generalisations of the finite monoid recognisers of automata theory for the study of circuit complexity classes: Boolean spaces with internal monoids and typed monoids. Using the setting of stamps, this allows us to generalise a number of results from algebraic automata theory as it relates to Büchi's logic on words. We obtain an Eilenberg theorem, a substitution principle based on Stone duality, a block product principle for typed stamps and, as our main result, a topological semidirect product construction, which corresponds to the application of a general form of quantification. These results provide tools for the study of language classes given by logic fragments such as the Boolean circuit complexity classes.