Based on an oral picture description task conducted among 46 participants, this contribution aims at describing how L1 speakers and learners of typologically different languages (French and Dutch) encode locative events. Moving away from the more traditional verb-centred approach, this contribution zooms in on the syntactic constructions used to encode locative events and the role they play in the overall discourse strategy in the productions of L1 speakers of Dutch and French and in those of French-speaking learners of Dutch. Our elicitation study confirms the typological differences between Dutch and French in the expression of location on the lexical level as well as on the constructional and discourse level. As for the learners’ descriptions, they appear to take an intermediate position between the native speakers of Dutch and French, suggesting that they become increasingly aware of the overall locative nature of Dutch.