Weakly metrizable pseudocompact groups

We study various weaker versions of metrizability for pseudocompact abelian groups G: singularity (G possesses a compact metrizable subgroup of the form mG, m>0), almost connectedness (G is metrizable modulo the connected component) and various versions of extremality in the sense of Comfort and co-authors (s-extremal, if G has no proper dense pseudocompact subgroups, r-extremal, if G admits no proper pseudocompact refinement). We introduce also weaklyextremal pseudocompact groups (weakening simultaneously s-extremal and r-extremal). It turns out that this “symmetric” version of ex-tremality has nice properties that restore the symmetry, to a certain extent, in the theory of extremal pseudocompact groups obtaining simpler uniform proofs of most of the known results. We characterize doubly extremal pseudocompact groups within the class of s-extremal pseudocompact groups. We give also a criterion for r-extremality for connected pseudocompact groups.