Ma daddy wis dead chuffed

The present paper aims to shed light on the dialectal distribution of the intensifier dead in four varieties of Present-Day English: American, British, Irish and Scottish English. For this purpose, data are drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Brigham Young University-British National Corpus, the Irish component of the International Corpus of English and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech. A collocational analysis of the adverbial and adjectival form dead makes it possible to see whether dead takes a literal reading or is rather used as a grammaticalised intensifier. The paper argues that intensifying dead is most productive in the Irish and Scottish varieties, followed by the British and American dialects.