The inclusive cross section for top-quark pair production measured by the CMS experiment in protonproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is compared to the QCD prediction at next-to-next-to-leading order with various parton distribution functions to determine the top-quark pole mass, m(t)(pole), or the strong coupling constant, alpha(S). With the parton distribution function set NNPDF2.3, a pole mass of 176.7(-3.4)(+3.8) GeV is obtained when constraining alpha(S) at the scale of the Z boson mass, m(Z), to the current world average. Alternatively, by constraining m(t)(pole) to the latest average from direct mass measurements, a value of alpha(S)(m(Z)) = 0.1151(-0.0032)(+0.0033) is extracted. This is the first determination of alpha(S) using events from top-quark production. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.