In the field of pattern mining, a negative sequential pattern is specified by means of a sequence consisting of events to occur and of other events, called negative events, to be absent. For instance, containment of the pattern ⟨a ¬b c⟩ arises with an occurrence of a and a subsequent occurrence of c but no occurrence of b in between.

This article is to shed light on the ambiguity of such a seemingly intuitive notation and we identify eight possible semantics for the containment relation between a pattern and a sequence. These semantics are illustrated and formally studied, in particular we propose dominance and equivalence relations between them. Also we prove that support is anti-monotonic for some of these semantics. Some of the results are discussed with the aim of developing algorithms to extract efficiently frequent negative patterns.