This paper reports the developmental stages of the acquisition of estar in stage-level predicate
constructions in the L2 Spanish grammar of native speakers of French and Portuguese. Copular verbs exist in the L1s of both
learner groups; however, only in Portuguese is there an aspectual contrast, with copula selection conditions that partially differ
from those of ser and estar in Spanish. The study used data extracted from the Corpus de
Aprendices de Español (CAES), made up of written texts produced by L2 Spanish learners from CEFR A1 to C1 levels. We attempt to
analyse whether, and to what degree, these L2 learners are sensitive to estar copula restrictions in adjective
constructions. Our analysis of the written production of 143 L1 French speakers and 361 L1 Portuguese speakers showed differing
acquisitional patterns depending on the L1. We consider that the estar overextension, found in the learners’
productions, is related to the process of developing the ability to identify the specific features that distinguish the use of
copular verbs in the interlanguage of our learners. Our findings, thus, provide a more fine-grained description of the semantic
representation and access of interpretable features in L2 Spanish with special relevance to current hypotheses on Second Language
Acquisition such as the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere
2009).