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The interjection was recognised as a part of speech by the Latin grammarians, replacing the lack of the article class in the Greek system and maintaining the eight parts of speech. However, it is noteworthy that the definition of interjection among the different scholars and grammarians is not stable and wavers between the need to identify its role as a part of speech – whether it was an adverb or not – and its pragmatic function, identifying to what extent it was connected to emotions. The scholarly discussion over the interjection entangled and disentangled itself during the centuries, and its theoretical status has been verified in the present paper, which shows how the classical and non-classical evidence reconnects this part of speech to its most rhetorical function. This paper delves into this debate, focusing on the interjection heu and providing a history of the interjection, covering the classical period and the Middle Ages, according to the linguistic perspective and highlighting how Latin grammarians considered it in their linguistic framework.

The present paper is focussed on the major corpora of non-literary documents written on tablets in Roman Britain. This encompasses the stylus tablets from Londinium-Bloomberg, the ink-written tablets from Carlisle and Vindolanda, and the curse tablets incised on lead. The main purpose of this analysis is to show from a quantitative perspective how these different corpora diverge from each other not only in respect of the writing material but also according to the presence or absence of specific linguistic features: gemination, degemination, vowel syncope, and presence or absence of initial h