We study the following problem: For which Tychonoff spaces $X$ do the free topological group $F(X)$ and the free abelian topological group $A(X)$ admit a quotient homomorphism onto a separable and nontrivial (i.e., not finitely generated) group? The existence of the required quotient homomorphisms is established for several important classes of spaces $X$, which include the class of pseudocompact spaces, the class of locally compact spaces, the class of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}$-compact spaces, the class of connected locally connected spaces, and some others.

We also show that there exists an infinite separable precompact topological abelian group $G$ such that every quotient of $G$ is either the one-point group or contains a dense non-separable subgroup and, hence, does not have a countable network.

It is proved that the free topological vector space $\mathbb{V}([0,1])$ contains an isomorphic copy of the free topological vector space $\mathbb{V}([0,1]^{n})$ for every finite-dimensional cube $[0,1]^{n}$, thereby answering an open question in the literature. We show that this result cannot be extended from the closed unit interval $[0,1]$ to general metrisable spaces. Indeed, we prove that the free topological vector space $\mathbb{V}(X)$ does not even have a vector subspace isomorphic as a topological vector space to $\mathbb{V}(X\oplus X)$, where $X$ is a Cook continuum, which is a one-dimensional compact metric space. This is also shown to be the case for a rigid Bernstein set, which is a zero-dimensional subspace of the real line.

We consider the following question: for which metrizable separable spaces $X$ does the free abelian topological group $A(X\oplus X)$ isomorphically embed into $A(X)$. While for many natural spaces $X$ such an embedding exists, our main result shows that if $X$ is a Cook continuum or $X$ is a rigid Bernstein set, then $A(X\oplus X)$ does not embed into $A(X)$ as a topological subgroup. The analogous statement is true for the free boolean group $B(X)$.

We give a complete description of the topological spaces X such that the free abelian topological group A(X) embeds into the free abelian topological group A(I) on the closed unit interval. In particular, the free abelian topological group A(X) on any finite-dimensional compact metrizable space X embeds into A(I). To obtain our description, we study similar embeddings of the free locally convex spaces and continuous surjections between the spaces of continuous functions with the pointwise topology. Proofs are based on the classical Kolmogorov's Superposition Theorem.