Anti-elementarity is a strong way of ensuring that a class of structures, in a given first-order language, is not closed under elementary equivalence with respect to any infinitary language of the form ℒ∞λ. We prove that many naturally defined classes are anti-elementary, including the following:
- the class of all lattices of finitely generated convex ℓ-subgroups of members of any class of ℓ-groups containing all Archimedean ℓ-groups;
- the class of all semilattices of finitely generated ℓ-ideals of members of any nontrivial quasivariety of ℓ-groups;
- the class of all Stone duals of spectra of MV-algebras — this yields a negative solution to the MV-spectrum Problem;
- the class of all semilattices of finitely generated two-sided ideals of rings;
- the class of all semilattices of finitely generated submodules of modules;
- the class of all monoids encoding the nonstable K0-theory of von Neumann regular rings, respectively, C*-algebras of real rank zero;
- (assuming arbitrarily large Erdős cardinals) the class of all coordinatizable sectionally complemented modular lattices with a large 4-frame.
The main underlying principle is that under quite general conditions, for a functor Φ:𝒜→ℬ, if there exists a noncommutative diagram →D of 𝒜, indexed by a common sort of poset called an almost join-semilattice, such that
- Φ→DI is a commutative diagram for every set I,
- Φ→D≇Φ→X for any commutative diagram →X in 𝒜,
then the range of Φ is anti-elementary.