Lattice varieties with non-elementary amalgamation classes (Q5932485)

For a class \(\mathcal K\), denote by \(\text{Amal} (\mathcal K\)) the subclass of all amalgamation bases of \(\mathcal K\). It is a question under what conditions \(\text{Amal} (\mathcal K\)) is an elementary class. For lattice varieties it was shown by C. Bergman in 1989 that no finitely generated non-distributive modular variety has an elementary amalgamation class. The authors prove a more general result. For a lattice \(K\) denote by \(K_{(2)}\) the lattice obtained by glueing 2 copies of \(K\) together, top element to bottom element. For a variety \(\mathcal V\) let \(\mathcal V_{MI}\) denote the class of maximal SI-members of \(\mathcal V\). Main result: Theorem 3.7. Suppose that \(\mathcal V\) is a finitely generated variety of lattices and suppose that \(K\in \text{Amal} (\mathcal V\)) is a simple lattice such that \(K_{(2)}\) is not a sublattice of any member of \({\mathcal V}_{(MI)}\). Then neither \(\text{Amal} (\mathcal V\)) nor its complement are elementary classes.