@book{Kulick2019bb,

title = {A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea},

author = {Don Kulick},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-06-18},

publisher = {Algonquin Books},

abstract = {As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of white society on the farthest reaches of the globe—and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {book}

}

@book{Kulick2019bb,

title = {A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap: The Life and Death of a Papuan Language},

author = {Don Kulick and Angela Terrill},

doi = {10.1515/9781501512209},

isbn = {1501517570},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-06-04},

publisher = {Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter},

abstract = {Tayap is a small, previously undocumented Papuan language, spoken in a singlevillage called Gapun, in the lower Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. Thelanguage is an isolate, unrelated to any other in the area. Furthermore, Tayap isdying. Fewer than fifty speakers actively command it today.Based on linguistic anthropological work conducted over the course of thirtyyears, this book describes the grammar of the language, detailing its phonology,morphology and syntax. It devotes particular attention to verbs, which are themost elaborated area of the grammar, and which are complex, fusional andmassively suppletive.The book also provides a full Tayap-English-Tok Pisindictionary.A particularly innovative contribution is the detailed discussions of howTayap’'s grammar is dissolving in the language of young speakers. The bookexemplifies how the complex structures in fluent speakers’ Tayap are reduced orreanalyzed by younger speakers.This grammar and dictionary should therefore be a valuable resource for anyoneinterested in the mechanics of how languages disappear. The fact that it is thesole documentation of this unique Papuan language should also make it ofinterest to areal specialists and language typologists.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {book}

}