Pseudovarieties defining classes of sofic subshifts closed under taking shift equivalent subshifts

Abstract

For a pseudovariety of ordered semigroups, let be the class of sofic subshifts whose syntactic semigroup lies in . It is proved that if contains then is closed under taking shift equivalent subshifts, and conversely, if is closed under taking conjugate subshifts then contains and . Almost finite type subshifts are characterized as the irreducible elements of , which gives a new proof that the class of almost finite type subshifts is closed under taking shift equivalent subshifts.