Based on the researches on the person deixis by numerous scholars, this paper focuses on a social and pragmatic analysis of the second person deixis English. The results are applicable to adequate translation of you. Person deixis is an important component of pragmatics. With reference to the addresser, the addressee and the third party involved in a conversation, person deixis indicate the social status, interpersonal relationship and other factors of the conversational parties. Since Brown

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... Gilman (1960) initiated the study of person deixis. Numerous scholars have researched the issue from the perspectives of semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and contrastive linguistics. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1979) examined how social factors are related to aspects of verbal interaction. The Chinese scholars have also studied deeply in the field of person deixis. He Ziran (1988 Ziran ( , 1997 and He Zhaoxiong (1989 Zhaoxiong ( , 2000 are chiefly devoted to the definition, classification and basic use of the deictic items. Chen Zhi'an and Peng Xuanwei (1994) apply the systemic and functional theories to the study of person deixis mainly on the lexical and grammatical level. Until the 1970s or 1980s, under the influence of discourse analysis, sociolinguists began to pay more attention to the social information about the addresser and addressee in the speech context. Huang Guowen (1999) makes a discourse analysis of the personal pronoun, while Tian Hailong (2001) conducts a sociolinguistic study of the choice between "we" and "wo-men" in modern Chinese monologues and finds that different addressers use the two personal pronouns at a different rate in expressing their ideas, which finding reflects a addresser's personality such as self-confidence and modesty. Du Xiaohong's paper (2003) probes the pragmatic effect and the artistic value of the unconventional choices of person deixis through an analysis of the unconventional use of person deixis in the Scarlet Letter. Based on their researches, this paper focuses on a social and pragmatic analysis of the second person deixis English. The results of this analysis are applicable to adequate translation of you. As to the second person deixis, many European languages have two forms of second person deixis. The so-called T-form is used to address intimate friends and relatives; while V-form is the plural form which is used for people one does not know or whom one treats with respect and deference (Duck, 1998) . In Old English, there were a V form and a T form for the addressee, which contrast revealed much of the social information about the two parties in communication. Brown (1965) also notes that the choice of just one single word (thou or you) tells everyone about the addresser's status and familiadty relative to the other person and communicates something about the closeness or social distance of relationship between addresser and addressee. You is thus used to address a person superior to oneself in status. Thou is reserved for those of status lower than oneself. Besides, thou was also used as an insult indicating moral distance or inferiority when two persons wore otherwise socially equal. On contrary, the V-form you call be used to satirize the addressee of a lower status.