We present a cut elimination argument that witnesses the conservativity of the compositional axioms for truth (without the extended induction axiom) over any theory interpreting a weak subsystem of arithmetic. In doing so we also fix a critical error in Halbach's original presentation. Our methods show that the admission of these axioms determines a hyper-exponential reduction in the size of derivations of truth-free statements. §1. Overview. Let IΔ 0 + exp and IΔ 0 + exp 1 be the first-order theories extending Robinson's arithmetic by Δ 0 -induction and, respectively, axioms expressing the totality of the exponentiation and hyper-exponentiation function. If S is a first-order theory interpreting IΔ 0 + exp then by CT[S] we denote the extension of S by a fresh unary predicate T and the compositional axioms of truth for T. 1 In this paper we provide syntactic proofs for the following theorems.Theorem 1.1. Let S be an elementary axiomatised theory in a finite language interpreting IΔ 0 + exp. Then CT[S] conservatively extends S. Moreover, this fact is verifiable in IΔ 0 + exp 1 .Let p be a fresh unary predicate symbol not present in the language L of S. An L-formula D is an S-schema if S D → for every L-formula and there exists a finite set of formulae U such that S Dx → ∃ ϕ∈U (x = ϕ[ /p] ). Theorem 1.2. Let S be as above. For any S-schema D, the theory CT[S] + ∀x(Dx → Tx) is a conservative extension of S. Moreover, this fact is verifiable in IΔ 0 + exp 1 .The first part of Theorem 1.1 was first established by Barwise and Schlipf in the early 70s (see Theorem IV.5.3 of [1]) and later independently proved by Kotlarski, Krajewski, and Lachlan [13] for the case of S = PA, also establishing the first part of Theorem 1.2 in this case. Both proofs are model-theoretic, showing that a countable nonstandard model of S contains a full satisfaction class if it is recursively saturated. Since every model of S is elementarily extended by a recursively saturated model of the same cardinality, conservativity is obtained. Recently, Enayat and