you

   In an utterance like: ‘Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing?’ the first ‘you’ is clearly vocative, while the others are pronominal.

   Vocative ‘you’ is usually stressed more strongly than the pronoun, and often occurs in what might be called a vocative position, so that the word order of the utterance signals the word’s changed role. ‘You’ used vocatively is frequently an insulting or aggressive term, or one which expresses contempt for an inferior. In Galsworthy’s In Chancery a character calls a waiter by saying ‘Hullo, you!’ A modern client in a restaurant would be likely to receive a surly response to such a call. Vocative ‘you’ can be softened if uttered in a friendly way. In Eating People Is Wrong, by Malcolm Bradbury, a man at a party says hello to a young woman. ‘Oh, hello, you,’ she replies.

   There is an exclamatory ‘you’ that a speaker utters when he or she meets someone unexpectedly, where the tone would normally be one of surprise. Clearly this would not be interpreted as condescension. There is another kind of surprised ‘you’ where the meaning is ‘you of all people’, as in an utterance like: ‘You swindled me - you!’ See also you + appositional name, phrase or clause. ‘You’ can become the head-word of a vocative expression and take on whatever value resides in the adjective that is used to qualify it. Common expressions are ‘lucky you!’ ‘poor you!’ ‘You’ also has a neutral, plural function in expressions like ‘the rest of you’, ‘both of you’, ‘all of you’, ‘the lot of you’.