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Mathieu Beaudouin, winner of the Fondation des Treilles "Young Researcher" Award 2023
Mathieu Beaudouin, a doctoral student in linguistics attached to the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale - CRLAO (Inalco-CNRS-EHESS), has been awarded the Fondation des Treilles' 2023 "Young Researcher" Prize. This prize will enable him to complete his thesis entitled Grammaire du tangoute : approche philologique, comparative et typologique, under the supervision of Guillaume Jacques (CNRS-EPHE/CRLAO).
Biography
Mathieu Beaudouin, currently a doctoral student in linguistics at CRLAO, is devoting his thesis to Tangoute, the medieval Gyalronguic language of the Xixia 西夏 empire (1038-1227), a powerful neighbor of the Chinese Song empire (960-1279). His work benefits from previous multidisciplinary training in linguistics, Chinese studies, history, law and anthropology, and combines the linguistic study of texts contained in Tangut documents with data from the modern languages of the Horpa group, whose close kinship with Tangut he has discovered.
His dissertation work, straddling three continents at CRLAO, Academia Sinica and Harvard, focused mainly on grammar: since starting his PhD, Mathieu has published/submitted 7 studies resolving key points of Tangut grammar, such as its TAME system, or a verbal alternation still unresolved since the (re)discovery of the language 115 years ago.
His current research interests include the phonetic reconstruction and classification of Tangut, the recollection of fragments stored at the BNF, the linguistic contributions of medieval Buddhist sutras translated into Tangut, and the editing of two collective works on Tangut studies and the study of medieval Tibeto-Burman languages.
Following the defense of his thesis this year, he will join a team that will comprehensively document the languages of the Horpa zone and propose a reconstruction of the common ancestor of Tangut and the Horpic languages. He also plans to carry out theoretical studies on the notions of grammatical category, imperative, reality and proof in linguistics, as well as more typological studies on the encoding of orientation, support verbs and the structure of gabaritic morphology. On the philological side, he wishes to propose an edition of the Tangut versions of the Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva Pūrvapraṇidhāna Sūtra and two other secular texts used during his thesis; finally, he wishes to begin a major project, a new translation of the Tangut Code of Laws, which will benefit from his grammatical discoveries and make this legal sum accessible to the greatest number.
Thesis summary
Tangut, a medieval language with a main documentary regime spanning the 11th to 13th centuries, is of particular importance in Sino-Tibetan linguistics, due to its historical depth and its membership of the Gyalronguic taxon, one of the most conservative of Sino-Tibetan. A great deal of work, mainly philological and phonological, but also grammatical, has been carried out on this language, first in Russia/Soviet Union, then in Japan, China and Taiwan. However, the studies of Nishida (1964/66), Sofronov (1968) and Kepping (1985), although each systematic in their own way, do not fully meet the definition of a descriptive grammar, which remains a gap to be filled within the field of documentation of Sino-Tibetan languages. This thesis sets out to fill this gap, providing linguists and researchers in Tangut studies with a complete and coherent tool, the originality of whose approach lies in the comparison of Tangut with its sister languages, particularly those of the Horpa group.
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Interview
In an interview conducted as part of the I-DEA program - Illustration et Documentation audiovisuelles des Études Aréales (LaCAS, Inalco), Mathieu Beaudouin sheds light on his research into tangoute, an extinct medieval Sino-Tibetan language.
View the video: La grammaire du tangoute, entretien avec Mathieu Beaudouin (CRLAO-Inalco), (20/10/2022, 21mn) - by Kexin Zhang (Chargée de communication, DIRVED, Inalco).
The Fondation des Treilles awards around twenty "Young Researcher" prizes per year. These research grants are awarded to French or foreign researchers at the end of their thesis or to post-doctoral students conducting their research in France.