Generating All Circular Shifts by Context-Free Grammars in Chomsky Normal Form

Let $\{a_1,a_2,\ldots,a_n\}$ be an alphabet of $n$ symbols and let $C_n$ be the language of circular shifts of the word $a_1a_2\cdots a_n$; so $C_n = \{a_1a_2\cdots a_{n-1}a_n, a_2a_3\cdots a_na_1, \ldots,a_na_1\cdots a_{n-2}a_{n-1}\}$. We discuss a few families of context-free grammars $G_n$ ($n\geq 1$) in Chomsky normal form such that $G_n$ generates $C_n$. The grammars in these families are inverstigated with respect to their descriptional complexity, i.e., we determine the number of nonterminal symbols $\nu(n)$ and the number of rules $\pi(n)$ of $G_n$ as functions of $n$. These $\nu$ and $\pi$ happen to be functions bounded by low-degree polynomials, particularly when we focus our attention to unambiguous grammars. Finally, we introduce a family of minimal unambiguous grammars for which $\nu$ and $\pi$ are linear.