Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
1. Introduction. The present paper is chiefly concerned with a generalization, to be known as a ‘D-interval’, of the notion of interval or segment in an arbitrary partially ordered group. This idea is originally due to Duthie (2), but was developed by him only in a lattice. In analogy with the use of the interval in the normal sense, notions of ‘D-distributivity’ and ‘D-modularity’ are defined in terms of the D-interval, and analogues of known properties of lattice-groups or ‘l– groups’ can be formulated which might be valid when a lattice structure is no longer assumed to exist; in particular, an attempt is made to provide such a generalization of the result of Freudenthal (3) that every Z-group is a distributive lattice, but, for an arbitrary partially ordered group, it is shown that only an ‘approximation’ (in terms of non-Archimedean elements) to the desired result actually holds, although any Archimedean partially ordered group is necessarily D-distributive.