A structure M is pregeometric if the algebraic closure is a pregeometry in all structures elementarily equivalent to M. We define a generalisation: structures with an existential matroid. The main examples are superstable groups of Lascar U-rank a power of ω and d-minimal expansion of fields. Ultraproducts of pregeometric structures expanding an integral domain, while not pregeometric in general, do have a unique existential matroid. Generalising previous results by van den Dries, we define dense elementary pairs of structures expanding an (...) integral domain and with an existential matroid, and we show that the corresponding theories have natural completions, whose models also have a unique existential matroid. We also extend the above result to dense tuples of structures. (shrink)

For a supersimple SU-rank 1 theory T we introduce the notion of a generic elementary pair of models of T . We show that the theory T* of all generic T-pairs is complete and supersimple. In the strongly minimal case, T* coincides with the theory of infinite dimensional pairs, which was used in 1184–1194) to study the geometric properties of T. In our SU-rank 1 setting, we use T* for the same purpose. In particular, we obtain a characterization of linearity (...) for SU-rank 1 structures by giving several equivalent conditions on T*, find a “weak” version of local modularity which is equivalent to linearity, show that linearity coincides with 1-basedness, and use the generic pairs to “recover” projective geometries over division rings from non-trivial linear SU-rank 1 structures. (shrink)