Several linguists and philosophers have argued that natural language predicates are Davidsonian in that they have an extra argument position for eventualities. Although Davidson (1967) himself was only concerned with action sentences, Kratzer (1995) extends his proposal to stage-level predicates in general, while Chierchia (1995) even goes so far as to suggest that every predicate, whatever its internal structure and aspectual characteristics, has a Davidsonian slot. Despite such differences, there is general agreement that temporal and adverbial modification are realized through the hidden event spot. In other words, adverbs and tense are construed as properties of eventualities.

In this paper I will explore the possibility that the Dutch particle eens and its German counterpart mal are overt manifestations of the Davidsonian argument. To begin with, I will argue that the occurrence of eens in Zij kuchte eens ‘She coughed’ can be understood in two ways: as an existential quantifier over stages, giving us an episodic sentence, or as a frame adverbial that evokes a characterizing reading. This semantic difference appears to correspond with differences in syntactic behavior, episodic eens and its German counterpart mal being restricted to the middle field (as true modal particles), whereas the frame adverbial can freely be topicalized. Following Chierchia (1995), I will show that the limited distribution of episodic eens follows from the need for a local licenser.

Interestingly, the related frequency adverb wel eens ‘once in a while, at times’ does not allow an episodic reading. The sentence Zij kuchte wel eens ‘She coughed at times’ can only be understood as a characterizing statement involving generalization over cases. In this respect wel eens differs sharply from the temporal adverbs soms ‘sometimes’, af en toe ‘off and on’ and nu en dan ‘now and then’, which permit episodic readings as well. I will argue that this is what legitimizes clusters like soms wel eens, af en toe wel eens and nu en dan wel eens, where wel eens serves as a syntactic suffix that eliminates the episodic reading. Belgian al eens, to be recognized in sentences involving present or future tense (Hij bezoekt al eens zijn moeder ‘He visits his mother once in a while’) behaves in many ways the same as wel eens, although it can also be used as Dutch al eens ‘already’. Its German counterpart schon mal is characterized by a similar ambiguity, meaning ‘once in a while, at times’ in present and future statements and ‘already’ in past and perfect sentences. Along thse lines the opposition between ook eens ‘also’ and ook wel eens ‘at times also’ can be understood as episodic quantification (Zij kuchtte ook eens ‘She also coughed’) vs. characterizing quantification (Zij kuchtte ook wel eens ‘She also coughed at times’).

We claim that all occurrences of adverbial eens must be analyzed in terms of this fundamental dichotomy, weak eens being an existential quantifier over events, whereas strong eens quantifies over temporal intervals. In particular, the use of eens in imperatives or, more generally, directives is a classic example of stage-level quantification. Finally, I will discuss the limited syntactic possibilities of wel eens and the issue of compositionality. By means of an analysis of the ambiguity of U kunt wel eens gelijk hebben ‘You may be right (at times)’ I will try to relate some occurrences of wel eens to epistemic wel.

University of Groningen