My friend and colleague Rebecca Posner, who has died aged 88, was professor of the Romance languages at Oxford University from 1978 until her retirement in 1996 and tutor to generations of students in French, Romance linguistics and, more unusually, Creole languages.
Born in the Durham mining village of Shotton Colliery, Rebecca was the daughter of William Reynolds, a miner, and his wife, Rebecca (nee Stevenson). When the mine closed, the family moved to Nuneaton, Warwickshire, where Rebecca attended Nuneaton girls’ school.
She won an open exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied French and comparative linguistics and gained her doctorate, all with brilliant commendations. At Oxford, she met Michael Posner, a student of economics, and they married in 1953.
After further research in Paris, Yale and Cambridge, Rebecca held senior posts in Ghana and York before returning to Oxford, where she was a fellow of St Hugh’s College and later chair of her faculty.
The two years that she spent as professor and head of French at the new University of Ghana, combining her day job with research on West African languages, made an indelible impression and she remained a lifelong supporter of Oxfam and its African programmes.
While in Ghana, she wrote a linguistic introduction to the Romance languages that was an immediate success, singled out by more than one of her former students as “inspirational”.
It was followed, at the end of her career, by two books, The Romance Languages (1996) and Linguistic Change in French (1997), both of which won international praise for their erudition and innovative approach.
A lively and provocative teacher, Rebecca preferred the Socratic method for tutorials and extempore delivery for lectures. She was an exacting but empathetic supervisor, famed for her incisive comments and insistence that her research students should spend less effort on getting it right and much more on getting it written.
Her love of anecdotes, witty asides and sweeping generalisations sometimes had unintended consequences. On one memorable occasion, she enlivened a dense exposition of theoretical morphology by noting that infixing could even be applied to her name, hence “Re-bloody-becca”. Not everyone gets to coin their own nickname.
Alongside the respected academic went the devoted wife and mother, the loyal friend, and the unshakeable belief in equality and social justice. As a resolute champion of women’s rights, she started her Oxford inaugural with a reference to her gender and noted that some of the most rigorous “scientific” work in her discipline had been done by women.
A lover of live theatre and opera, above all Mozart, she kept herself fit and active well into old age by gardening and swimming regularly in the competitive university pool.
Michael died in 2006. Rebecca is survived by their son, Christopher, and daughter, Barbara.
