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In linguistics, coercion is a term applied to a process of reinterpretation that is triggered by a mismatch between the semantic properties of a selector and the semantic properties of the selected element. The term was first used in the semantic literature by Marc Moens and Mark Steedman, who adopted it on "loose analogy with type-coercion in programming languages". In the framework of the generative lexicon (a formal compositional approach to lexical semantics), Pustejovsky (1995:111) defines coercion as "a semantic operation that converts an argument to the type which is expected by a function, where it would otherwise result in a type error." "Coercion" in the Pustejovsky framework includes complement coercion and aspectual coercion.