Subgroups of HNN Groups and Groups with one Defining Relation

HNN groups have appeared in several papers, e.g., [3; 4; 5; 6; 8]. In this paper we use the results in [6] to obtain a structure theorem for the subgroups of an HNN group and give several applications.We shall use the terminology and notation of [6]. In particular, if K is a group and {φi} is a collection of isomorphisms of subgroups {Li} into K, then we call the group1the HNN group with base K, associated subgroups { Li,φi(Li)} and free part the group generated by t1, t2, …. (We usually denote φi(Li) by Mi or L–i.) The notion of a tree product as defined in [6] will also be needed.