Yann Le Moullec, winner of the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris 2025 thesis prize

After a master's degree in linguistics at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and an Erasmus stay at the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands, Yann Le Moullec obtained a doctoral contract at Inalco, under the supervision of Isabelle Bril and Alexandra Aikhenvald. He defended his thesis on December 16, 2024 at the Maison de la Recherche. Le Genre en angaataha: documentation et description d'une langue anga de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée is a grammatical sketch of angaataha, an endangered language spoken by 3,000 inhabitants of the Langimar valley in Papua New Guinea. Particular attention was paid to nominal categorization and the semantic and syntactic functioning of the eleven genres of Angaataha.

Yann Le Moullec was supported by the Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO) laboratory and Inalco for two long missions to Papua New Guinea in 2020 and 2022, as well as a stay at James Cook University in Australia. Nine months spent in the field have enabled the Angaatiya to build up a corpus of oral data, currently being archived in the Pangloss collection (CNRS).

The Chancellerie des Universités has decided to award the Thesis Prize to Mr. Le Moullec. The award ceremony took place on December 2, 2025 at the Sorbonne. As one happiness never comes alone, this honor follows by a few months the birth of his daughter Iseult.

Gender in angaataha: documentation and description of an Anga language from Papua New Guinea

Angaataha is an Anga language spoken by 3,000 people in Papua New Guinea, in the Langimar valley. The present thesis is a work of documentation and description based on data collected during eight months of field surveys among the Angaatiya (2020, 2022). The first part is a grammar sketch. Angaataha displays properties typical of Papuan languages: few vowels, phonemic tones (H, HL, L), a predominantly suffixal morphology, classifier verbs, as well as accusative alignment marked casually and by actancial clues on verbs. Verbal forms are characterized by a large number of affixes and a high density of grammatical information. Chains of propositions (linked by switch-reference and associated movement) and gender agreement play an important role in syntax. Nominal morphology features numerous locative cases, dyadic suffixes (encoding kinship relations), and a system of eleven genders. The second part describes gender as a system of agreement and assignment. The targets of agreement include adjectives, determiners, pronouns (intensifiers or interrogatives), verbs in relative clauses, and noun complements when the head is implied. Gender agreement makes it easier to understand statements in frequently elliptical discourse. Gender assignment (the categorization of nouns) uses a very tight - and marginally opaque - network of semantic criteria, based mainly on sex, humanitude, shape and size.

Each year, the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris awards prizes from the proceeds of donations and bequests made to the former University of Paris or certain higher education establishments in the Île-de-France region. These prizes are awarded to doctoral students in recognition of their academic and scientific excellence and merit.

These prizes are awarded to doctoral students in recognition of their academic and scientific excellence and merit.