One of the principles governing utterance structure in initial stages, i.e. the so-called Basic Variety, is that the NP-referent with highest control comes first (Klein & Perdue 1997: 315). This semantic principle has not been tested in the grammar of more advanced L2 learners that have benefited from guided instruction. In the aim of addressing this gap, our study analyses utterance structure in productions where agent-first and patient-first are two options. Crucially, French and Spanish share a common repertoire of agent-first constructions, such as SVO with causative verbs (1a) and causative verbal periphrasis (1b), as well as a common repertoire of patient-first constructions, such as passives with ‘être’/‘ser’ (2a), and verbal periphrasis ‘se faire’/‘hacerse’ (2b). The former constructions mark the instantiation of the patient as object, whereas the latter mark it as subject. 1. a. Le bully l’a agressé / El bully lo agredió [The bully attacked him] b. Le garçon l’a fait trébucher / El chico lo hizo tropezar [The guy made him tripped] 2. a. Il a été agressé / Él fue agredido [He was assaulted] b. Il s’est fait gifler / Él se hizo abofetear [He got slapped] We designed a visual stimulus in which 50% of the vignettes represented a human figure as agent, and 50% as patient with another animated entity; the latter were our target items. Participants were asked to retell what happened to the human figure. First, we carried out an offline-retelling task targeting the elicitation of intra-typological variation data across L1 French vs L1 Spanish (84 responses obtained from 21 speakers per group). Then, we replicated the task in L2 French with a group of 20 Spanish-speaking learners. Our L1 results show significant differences in the syntactic instantiation of patients: they are saliently marked as syntactic subjects in French and as direct objects in Spanish (e.g., Il s’est fait agresser vs. El bully lo golpeó). This result suggests that constructions in Spanish are stronger governed by the semantic principle Agent-first, even in contexts where a form of passive construction could be expected. Unlikely L1 grammars, the degree to which one argument “controls” the situation was not so clear-cut expressed in L2 French grammars. Learner Varieties exhibit greater frequencies of stative verbs that give to read the syntactic subject as a sort of middle voice’s experiencer (e.g., Il a peur du chien). Beyond this developmental feature, L2 grammars prove to be Agent-first rooted. In all, our results suggest that L2 learners do not efficiently overcome the Agent-first pervasiveness of their L1 in passive contexts, suggesting that the Agent-first principle is not only linked to the learner’s environment and competence but also to the typological differences between the native and the target language.