Permutations and words counted by consecutive patterns

Generating functions which count occurrences of consecutive sequences in a permutation or a word which matches a given pattern are studied by exploiting the combinatorics associated with symmetric functions. Our theorems take the generating function for the number of permutations which do not contain a certain pattern and give generating functions refining permutations by the both the total number of pattern matches and the number of non-overlapping pattern matches. Our methods allow us to give new proofs of several previously recorded results on this topic as well as to prove new extensions and new q-analogues of such results.