Points of continuity for semigroup actions

The purpose of this paper is to provide a more unified approach to questions involving the existence of points of joint continuity in separately continuous semigroup actions by deriving a small number of general principles which suffice to deduce previously derived results and generalizations thereof. The first major result gives sufficient conditions for a point to be a point of joint continuity in a general setting of “migrants”, a useful symmetric generalization of semigroup actions. Results concerning actions of semigroups with group-like properties follow. In the latter part of the paper the notion of a subordinate point is introduced and joint continuity at subordinate points for various settings is proved. Finally, these results are applied to linear actions on locally convex spaces. © 1984 American Mathematical Society