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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
The notion of a model companion for a first-order theory T was introduced and discussed in [1] and [2] as a generalization of the concept of a model completion of a theory. Both concepts reflect, on a general model theoretic level, properties of the theory of algebraically closed fields. The literature provides many examples of first-order theories with and without model companions—see [3] for a survey of these results. In this paper, we give a further generalization of the notion of a model companion.
Roughly speaking, we allow instead of embeddings more general classes of maps (e.g. homomorphisms) and we allow any set of formulas which is preserved by these maps instead of existential formulas. This plan is worked out in detail in [5], where we discuss also several examples. One of these examples is given in this paper.
In order to clarify the model theoretic background, we now introduce the relevant concepts and theorems from [5].