Hedde was born in 1975 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. After having attended the municipal gymnasium in Utrecht, he studied Dutch language and culture in the same place (having also taken courses in physics, math and philosophy). In 2000 he began a PhD project on negation in Dutch dialects at the University of Amsterdam; in 2004 he defended his dissertation.
From 2004 to 2006 Hedde worked as a postdoc in the SFB “Linguistic Datastructures” at the University of Tübingen, after which he took up a position as assistant professor of Dutch linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. In 2009 he also held a position as visiting assistant professor at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT in 2019. In 2012 Hedde was appointed a full professor in Göttingen. There, he is the speaker of the Research Training Group “Form-meaning mismatches”. Hedde has held guest lecture appointments at, among others, Cambridge University, MIT and UCLA. Since 2017 he also has served as an associate editor of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and since 2018 as general editor of Linguistic Variation. In addition, he is a member of the editorial boards of Glossa, Linguistic Inquiry, the Journal of Linguistics, and Pragmatics & Semantics. Hedde used to be one of the organizers of the EGG summer schools.
