Syndetically proximal pairs

For continuous self-maps of compact metric spaces, we study the syndetically proximal relation, and in particular we identify certain sufficient conditions for the syndetically proximal cell of each point to be small. We show that any interval map f with positive topological entropy has a syndetically scrambled Cantor set, and an uncountable syndetically scrambled set invariant under some power of f. In the process of proving this, we improve a classical result about interval maps and establish that if f is an interval map with positive topological entropy and m ⩾ 2 , then there is n ∈ N such that the one-sided full shift on m symbols is topologically conjugate to a subsystem of f 2 n (the classical result gives only semi-conjugacy).