Yann Le Moullec, winner of the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris 2025 thesis prize
Yann Le Moullec was awarded the thesis prize for Humanities (all disciplines) for his dissertation "Gender in Angaataha: documentation and description of an Angan language of Papua New Guinea".
After a master's degree in linguistics at École Pratique des Hautes Études and an Erasmus stay at 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 Maison de la Recherche. Gender in Angaataha: documentation and description of an Angan language of Papua New Guinea is a grammatical sketch of Angaataha, an endangered language spoken by the 3,000 inhabitants of the Langimar valley in Papua New Guinea. Particular attention was paid to nominal categorization and the eleven genders of Angaataha.
Yann Le Moullec was supported by the Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO) research unite 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 in the field have enabled him and the Angaatiya to gather 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 happiness never comes alone, this honor follows the birth of his daughter Iseult by a few months.
Gender in Angaataha: documentation and description of an Angan language from Papua New Guinea
Angaataha is an endangered language spoken by the 3,000 Angaatiya of the Langimar valley in Papua New Guinea. The present thesis is a work of documentation and description based on data collected during nine months of fieldwork (2020, 2022).
The first part is a grammar covering the essentials of phonology, morphology and syntax. Verbs have complex forms due to the number and semantic density of affixes. Nominal morphology includes fifteen locative cases, dyadic pronouns (encoding kinship) and eleven genders. The syntax uses a twofold system, reputedly unique in the world, of switch-reference and switch-location.
The second part describes the eleven genders of the Angaataha language. Gender agreement is marked by suffixes on modifiers, attributes and substitutes of the nominal phrase (adjectives, pronouns, verbs of relative propositions, etc.). Categorization is based on a complex network of semantic criteria.
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.
Chancellerie des Universités de Paris awards prizes to doctoral students in recognition of their academic and scientific excellence and merit.