you + category of person

   This is an exclamatory kind of vocative used when someone is thought to display the characteristics of a certain category of people.

   English people, for example, may be thought by foreigners to behave at times in ways which are noticeably and particularly English, so the vocative ‘you English!’ will be used. It occurs, in fact, in Dover One, by Joyce Porter; Funeral in Berlin, by Len Deighton; Shipmaster, by Gwyn Griffin. In each case the speaker is not English. Funeral in Berlin has a similar example of ‘you French’, spoken by someone who is not French, but addressed, as are the examples above, to someone who does belong to the category mentioned.

   ‘You women’, which occurs in Sandra, by Pearl Bell, is another typical vocative of this kind. The speaker would always be a man, and we are once again dealing with an exclamatory vocative, not a mere exclamation.

   It is a vocative utterance in that it tells us about the speaker’s attitude to the person who is present, which a straightforward exclamation probably would not do.

   The attitude is usually light-hearted bewilderment or surprise at the behaviour of the person concerned, which is thought, however, to be typical of a category of people rather than individual. Occasionally the attitude is more aggressive or unfriendly. This is easily indicated by either the inclusion of other words in the vocative group, or by the category to which the listener is assigned.

   The following examples may make the point more clearly: ‘you young men’, used in The Affair, by C.P.Snow; ‘you bloody historians and your periods’, in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson; ‘you anarchists’, in The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes; ‘you impetuous young people’ and ‘you office boys’, in A Kind of Loving, by Stan Barstow; ‘you Irishmen’ and ‘you aristocrats’, in The Limits of Love, by Frederic Raphael; ‘you intellectual types’, in Room at the Top, by John Braine.

   One further point to mention about this type of vocative is that all those who fit the category are not being addressed by the speaker at the time. There is clearly a difference between a sentence like ‘Come here, you men’, addressed to say, three men, and ‘you men!’ when uttered by a woman to one or more men in order to express some kind of reaction to their typically masculine behaviour.