  We investigate the phenomenon of non-recursive trade-offs between
descriptional systems in an abstract fashion. We aim at categorizing
non-recursive trade-offs by bounds on their growth rate, and show how to deduce
such bounds in general. We also identify criteria which, in the spirit of
abstract language theory, allow us to deduce non-recursive tradeoffs from
effective closure properties of language families on the one hand, and
differences in the decidability status of basic decision problems on the other.
We develop a qualitative classification of non-recursive trade-offs in order to
obtain a better understanding of this very fundamental behaviour of
descriptional systems.
