In this paper the acquisition and use of emphatic constructions by advanced guided learners of French, in particular (Dutch) first grade university students of French are studied and compared to the acquisition and use of emphatic constructions by (Dutch) secondary school pupils learning French in a purely institutional situation. It is shown that the learners use appropriate syntactic constructions to emphasize topics or foci, but that quantitatively they do not use these syntactic constructions in a target-like fashion. On the basis of the results it is suggested that obligatory, i.e., one-to-one, pragmatic-syntactic interface relations (c'est-cleft) are more easily acquired by guided learners than optional, i.e., one-to-more, interface relations (dislocation and il y a-cleft). It is claimed that learners will have to be exposed to native spoken French in order to become aware of the relative strength of one-to-more interface rules in oral French. (Contains 6 tables and 4 notes.)