We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child did not eat the candies") in 34.3% of the cases, by producing a nuclear pitch accent on the finite verb (i.e. verum focus accent). Experiment 2 revealed that high-proficient German and Dutch non-native speakers of Italian linguistically encoded polarity contrast more frequently, either using a verum focus accent (German) or lexical markers (Dutch). This corresponds closely to the patterns preferred in their native languages. Our results show L1 transfer on three levels: (1) the relevance of the pragmatic category (i.e. marking polarity contrast on the assertion component), (2) the linguistic markers to encode polarity contrast and (3) the phonetic implementation of the intonational marking. These three levels of transfer have implications for how non-native speakers acquire the L2 discourse organizational principles and the linguistic markers to encode them.