Intensionality was only alleged: On adjective-noun composition in distributional semantics

Formal semantics has traditionally distinguished between extensional and intensional aspects of meaning, roughly equivalent to reference and what people intuitively call "meaning", respectively. It has primarily focused on extension, since this allows for predictions to be made and tested by building models of meaning that are directly grounded on reference, using set theoretic tools. Distributional semantics, in contrast, has been used to model phenomena that are hard to pinpoint using reference only, such as similarity in word meaning. Since the two approaches are largely complementary, it makes sense to use the latter to reexamine puzzles posed by the former.