Correlation of sequences and of measures, generic points for joinings and ergodicity of certain cocycles

The main subject of the paper, motivated by a question raised by Boshernitzan, is to give criteria for a bounded complex-valued sequence to be uncorrelated to any strictly ergodic sequence. As a tool developed to study this problem we introduce the notion of correlation between two shift-invariant measures supported by the symbolic space with complex symbols. We also prove a "lifting lemma" for generic points: given a joining $\xi$ of two shift-invariant measures $\mu$ and $\nu$, every point $x$ generic for $\mu$ lifts to a pair $(x,y)$ generic for $\xi$ (such $y$ exists in the full symbolic space). This lemma allows us to translate correlation between bounded sequences to the language of correlation of measures. Finally, to establish that the property of an invariant measure being uncorrelated to any ergodic measure is essentially weaker than the property of being disjoint from any ergodic measure, we develop and apply criteria for ergodicity of four-jump cocycles over irrational rotations. We believe that apart from the applications to studying the notion of correlation, the two developed tools: the lifting lemma and the criteria for ergodicity of four-jump cocycles, are of independent interest. This is why we announce them also in the title. In the Appendix we also introduce the notion of conditional disjointness.