This study investigates the acquisition of scope items such as ‘only’, ‘even’, ‘also’, ‘still’, ‘again’, ‘already’ etc. in the longitudinal data of untutored second language learners of English, French and German. These items are found to appear in a fixed sequence: additive/restrictive > iterative > contrastive, which correlates crosslinguistically with the development of learner varieties from a prebasic to a postbasic level. Analysis of the discourse behaviour of these particles suggests that while the communicative potential of these items justifies their early appearance, their use is constrained by the global organisation of learner varieties. In other words, appearance of particular items is constrained by the learner’s developmental stage.