A celebrated result by Davis, Putnam, Robinson, and Matiyasevich shows that a set of integers is listable if and only if it is positive existentially definable in the language of arithmetic. We investigate analogues of this result over structures endowed with a listable presentation. When such an analogue holds, the structure is said to have the DPRM property. We prove several results addressing foundational aspects around this problem, such as uniqueness of the listable presentation, transference of the DPRM property under interpretation, and its relation with positive existential bi-interpretability. A first application of our results is the rigorous proof of (strong versions of) several folklore facts regarding transference of the DPRM property. Another application of the theory we develop is that it will allow us to link various Diophantine conjectures to the question of whether the DPRM property holds for global fields. This last topic includes a study of the number of existential quantifiers needed to define a Diophantine set.

We introduce and study a natural class of fields in which certain first-order definable sets are existentially definable, and characterise this class by a number of equivalent conditions. We show that global fields belong to this class, and in particular obtain a number of new existential (or diophantine) predicates over global fields.

Given a global field $K$ and a positive integer $n$, we present a diophantine criterion for a polynomial in one variable of degree $n$ over $K$ not to have a root in $K$. This strengthens a result by Colliot-Thélène and Van Geel [Compositio Math. 151 (2015), 1965–1980] stating that the set of non-$n$th powers in a number field $K$ is diophantine. We also deduce a diophantine criterion for a polynomial over $K$ of given degree in a given number of variables to be irreducible. Our approach is based on a generalisation of the quaternion method used by Poonen and Koenigsmann for first-order definitions of $\mathbb{Z}$ in $\mathbb{Q}$.