In this contribution we will present a corpus-based comparison of the use of intensifying constructions in (written) native Dutch (Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands), Dutch by French-speaking learners (Leerdercorpus Nederlands) and native French (Frantext). The central focus will be on the competition between morphological and syntactic means to intensify adjectives. The analysis will take a constructional perspective on language acquisition and multilingualism (cf. Tomasello 2003; Goldberg 2010; Höder 2012, 2014). From such a usage-based point of view, second language acquisition is presumed to be more complex than L1 acquisition because of the competition between the specific constructions of the foreign language with the L1 constructions (Ellis & Cadierno 2009). Applying this hypothesis of “constructional transfer†to intensification, we can assume on the one hand that French-speaking learners of Dutch will underuse typical Germanic means of intensification such as ‘elative’ compounds (knalrood ‘completely red’) (Hoeksema 2012). On the other hand the learners are expected to overuse syntactic constructions frequently used in French, such as adverbial modification (tout rouge, ‘completely red’) and adjectival reduplication (rouge rouge ‘completely red’) (Riegel e.a.1994). The provisional findings of our data analysis confirm our hypothesis. Learners clearly overuse adverbial intensification (96,6%) in comparison to native Dutch speakers (74,4%). Furthermore they underuse intensifying compounds (learners 1,6% vs natives 13,8%) and prefixes (learners 1,8% vs natives 8,4%). At the semantic level, our corpus study indicates that natives apply intensification far more frequently to ‘limit’ adjectives than learners (e.g. totaal verkeerde aanwijzingen, ‘totally wrong directions’) (learners 0,4% vs natives 43,5%). Inversely, learners mostly intensify ‘scalar’ adjectives (e.g. héél goede vraag ‘very good question’) (learners 72,9% vs natives 52,9%) and make more frequently use of ...