Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
For a complex space X we consider the group Aut (X) of all automorphisms of X, where an automorphism means a holomorphic automorphism, i.e. an injective holomorphic mapping of X onto X itself with the holomorphic inverse. In 1935, H. Cartan showed that Aut (X) has a structure of a real Lie group if X is a bounded domain in CN([7]) and, in 1946, S. Bochner and D. Montgomery got the analogous result for a compact complex manifold X ([2] and [3]). Afterwards, the latter was generalized by R.C. Gunning ([11]) and H. Kerner ([16]), and the former by W. Kaup ([14]), to complex spaces. The purpose of this paper is to generalize these results to the case of complex spaces with weaker conditions. For brevity, we restrict ourselves to the study of σ-compact irreducible complex spaces only.