The past twenty years have seen an abundance of research demonstrating the necessity of assuming a REALIZATIONAL approach to inflection [Matthews, P. H., 1972, Inflectional Morphology, Cambridge University Press; Anderson, S. R., 1977, On the formal description of inflection, Chicago Linguistic Society 13.15-44, 1982, Where’s Morphology?, Linguistic Inquiry 13.571-612; Zwicky, A. M., 1985, How to describe inflection, Berkeley Linguistic Society 11.372-86, and others]. In this sort of approach, an inflected word's association with its morphosyntactic feature specification is logically prior to the spelling out to its inflectional markings, because it is this very association that determine the sequence of operations by which those markings are introduced; the realizational approach thus entails a rejection of the assumption that a word's morphosyntactic feature content is built up cumulatively from that of its inflectional "morphemes" by a percolation mechanism.
- Stump (2004), a pag.94