0 Introduction Much linguistic research has focused on interlanguage (IL) deletion and epenthesis, most often within a typological framework (e.g. Eckman 1977, 1986, 1991, Eckman & Iverson 1993, Carlisle 1998). While typological analyses are generally descriptively and predictively adequate, they arguably have three important weaknesses. First, typological accounts have little to say about the ...