The interpretation of coercion constructions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predicate. We show that this procedure encounters empirical difficulties. Focussing on the begin/commencer case, we show that the coercion interpretation results both from general semantic processes and properties of the predicate, and we argue that it is best represented at the lexical level. .
