A new approach to the grammic monoid

Abstract: We give an alternative description of the grammic monoid in terms of weakly increasing subsequences. Specifically, we show that words $u,v$ in the generators ${1,\ldots, n}$ determine the same element of the grammic monoid of rank $n$ if and only if for all $1 \leq p \leq q$, the maximum length of a weakly increasing subsequence on alphabet ${p,\ldots, q}$ is the same in $u$ and $v$. Our proof makes use of a particular tropical representation of the plactic monoid determined by such sequences: we demonstrate that the grammic monoid is isomorphic to the image of this representation, and (by applying a result of the first author and Kambites) immediately deduce that the grammic monoid of rank $n$ satisfies exactly the same semigroup identities as the monoid of $n \times n$ upper triangular tropical matrices. This gives a partial generalisation of a result of Volkov, who has shown that the grammic monoid of rank $3$ satisfies exactly the same semigroup identities as the plactic monoid of rank $3$ which in turn is known (by applying a result of the first author and Kambites) to satisfy the exactly the same semigroup identities as the monoid of $3 \times 3$ upper triangular tropical matrices. Furthermore, we find that the grammic monoid of infinite rank does not satisfy any non-trivial semigroup identity, and demonstrate that the grammic congruence satisfies some useful compatibility properties.