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[1] To my knowledge, a similar study dedicated to the way ancient grammarians approached this word class has never been realized before. There are however succinct references to Donatus' and Priscian's works, the most famous grammarians in the antiquity, in some of the works interested in the history of linguistics, and a few short mentions in some of the contemporary articles on interjection.

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[2] The title is a reference to Felix Ameka's (1992) article, "Interjection - a universal, yet neglected part of speech", Journal of Pragmatics, 18:2-3, 101-118.

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[3] Throughout this work, I understand by "interjectional conversion" the process by which a linguistic unit, different from primary interjections, acquires enough features to be considered a secondary or derived interjection.

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[4] This functional kinship between interjection and adverb is underlined by some contemporary studies that have identified the modalizing function of some interjections, and attributed them the syntactic values of modal complements (see The Stemmatic Grammar model, for instance).

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[5] "Probus" refers to the anonymous author of Instituta Artium erroneously attributed to Probus.

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[6] The definition of some occurrences of heu, in specific contexts, as an affirmative adverb can be found also in contemporary works that include the negative and affirmative adverbs in the class of the interjection, in contexts similar to those recalled by Latin grammarians.

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[7] The examples mentioned by Priscian are all Greek loans, borrowed probably through lyric and dramatic writings. The case of phy relates to the problematic, hesitant transcription of the Greek aspirated consonant φ in the Latin alphabet, as f or ph, as well as the adaptation to Latin phonology and graphic representation of the Greek phoneme υ - the so-called sonus intermedius - represented in Latin texts as i or u. The other two examples contain diphthongs that are rare or inexistent in Latin.

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[8] This last example is also relevant for a phenomenon attested also in the lexical dynamics of contemporary language. There are words, borrowed from foreign languages and used exclusively as interjections, although in the source language they have a full referential meaning. The phrase eia tu eia fac tu fac, is actually reduced to an incomprehensible formula, and attributed a function of warning. For the author of this fragment, it seems that the phrase has lost its transparency and the possibility to decompose it into the relevant pieces.

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[9] The feature of spontaneity determined other authors to banish the interjection from the language, from the collection of conventional linguistic signs, and to link them to animals' cries.

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[10] Contemporary grammarians are also tempted to treat interjection and onomatopoeia together, considering interjection as a special type of onomatopoeia, or reversly, classifying onomatopoeias as a special type of imitative interjections. The two may share some formal and syntactic features, but a pragmatic and functional approach would elucidate without difficulty their different natures.