The role of interjections in grammatical theory has a checkered past (on ancient grammar, see Colombat 2016). In contemporary linguistics, Biber calls interjections “inserts” (Biber et al. 1999), while Culpepper and Kytö distinguish word-form interjections from nonwords or “pragmatic noise” (2010: 199). When thirteenth-century grammarians became interested in the status of interjections and irregular speech, they ended up articulating pragmatic arguments about language and communication. Interjections posed provocative but unresolved theoretical questions about the nature of utterance, about the boundary between linguistic and nonlinguistic vocalization, and about linguistic and pragmatic meaning more generally. Some medieval grammarians and philosophers explored how natural and conventional interjections functioned as speech phenomena and were communicative even though those expressions seemed to exceed the field of grammatica as earlier Latin grammarians had conceived it. Bacon shows this in his semiotic and grammatical work. Other grammarians associated, intellectually at least, with Robert Kilwardby composed treatises on the interjection which often elaborated pragmatic perspectives on grammar, meaning, and linguistic form different from the theory of language worked out by modistic grammarians. From the Middle Ages to the present, interjections and similar kinds of vocalizations have enticed linguistic exploration by challenging existing linguistic categories.

Irène Rosier (1994) refers to a group of mostly thirteenth-century grammarians and philosophers as “intentionalists” with respect to language use and meaning. But the grammarians she discusses deployed many of the same linguistic and logical concepts and metalanguage as the modistae and, more distantly, Abelard, especially around the concept of intentio. What separates these different philosophers and grammarians is the theoretical framework or presuppositions they adopted or the outcome they were looking to.