A proof theoretic study of abstract termination principles

Abstract: We carry out a proof theoretic analysis of the wellfoundedness of recursive path orders in an abstract setting. We outline a very general termination principle and extract from its wellfoundedness proof subrecursive bounds on the size of derivation trees which can be defined in G\"{o}del's system T plus bar recursion. We then carry out a complexity analysis of these terms, and demonstrate how this can be applied to bound the derivational complexity of term rewrite systems.