Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The first main result of the paper is a criterion for a partially commutative group $\mathbb{G}$ to be a domain. It allows us to reduce the study of algebraic sets over $\mathbb{G}$ to the study of irreducible algebraic sets, and reduce the elementary theory of $\mathbb{G}$ (of a coordinate group over $\mathbb{G}$) to the elementary theories of the direct factors of $\mathbb{G}$ (to the elementary theory of coordinate groups of irreducible algebraic sets).
Then we establish normal forms for quantifier-free formulas over a non-abelian directly indecomposable partially commutative group $\mathbb{H}$. Analogously to the case of free groups, we introduce the notion of a generalised equation and prove that the positive theory of $\mathbb{H}$ has quantifier elimination and that arbitrary first-order formulas lift from $\mathbb{H}$ to $\mathbb{H}\,*\,F$, where $F$ is a free group of finite rank. As a consequence, the positive theory of an arbitrary partially commutative group is decidable.