c Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 2003 Annals of Combinatorics Partially Ordered Generalized Patterns and k-ary Words

AMS Subject Classication: 05A05, 05A15 Abstract. Recently, Kitaev [9] introduced partially ordered generalized patterns (POGPs) in the symmetric group, which further generalize the generalized permutation patterns introduced by Babson and Steingŕmsson [1]. A POGP p is a GP some of whose letters are incomparable. In this paper, we study the generating functions (g.f.) for the number of k-ary words avoiding some POGPs. We give analogues, extend and generalize several known results, as well as get some new results. In particular, we give the g.f. for the entire distribution of the maximum number of non-overlapping occurrences of a pattern p with no dashes (which is allowed to have repetition of letters), provided we know the g.f. for the number of k-ary words that avoid p