Hedde Zeijlstra - Biography#

Hedde Zeijlstra was born in 1975 in Rotterdam (NL). He obtained an MA degree in Dutch language and linguistics. In 2000 he began a PhD project which culiminated in his 2024 influential PhD dissertation "Sentential negation and Negative Concord" (cited more than 1250 times).

From 2004 to 2006 Zeijlstra 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 2009. In 2012 Zeijlstra was appointed a full professor in Göttingen in English syntax and theory of grammar (currently W3). He declined professorial offers from the university of Geneva and the Humboldt University in Berlin

Zeijlstra has held guest lecture appointments at Cambridge University, MIT and UCLA.

Zeijlstra acts as director (speaker) of the Research Training Group 2636 "Form-meaning mismatches" (2021-2030), Zeijlstra is co-director of the Collaborative Research Center 1629 "NegLAB". In 2024 Zeijlstra was awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced grant on his research project "Unpacking Paradigmatic Gaps." Next to the above projects, he has obtained extended funding for several smaller projects of appr. 6.6M EUR. The total funding amount that he was involved in exceeds 33 M EUR.

Zeijlstra published intensively on negation, modality and agreement, with major publications in Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Language Acquisition, Frontiers in Psychology and the Journal of Semantics. His h-index is 28. He has published a seminal momograph on negation and negative dependencies (Oxford University Press, 2022), a well-used introductory textbook on syntax (with Olaf Koeneman (Cambridge University Press, 2017, 2nd edition in press). He also published two popular scientific books in language and linguistics in Dutch. One of them will appear in English (The splendid similicty of language, Cambridge University Press), and German translations in 2026.

Zeijlstra has supervised 14 PhD theses (with 10 of them currently occupying (junior) positions in academics) and is currently supervising 13 PhD theses. In addition, he currently oversees 10 postdocs, one senior lecturer and four lecturers. Most of his former postdocs secured positions in academics or the industry.

From 2017-2025 Zeijlstra served as an associate editor of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and has been general editor of Linguistic Variation. Since 2018. In addition, he is a member of the editorial boards of Glossa, Linguistic Inquiry, the Journal of Linguistics, and Pragmatics & Semantics. Zeijlstra is an elected member of the linguistics panel of the DFG (the German national research foundation).

Zeijlstra has provided more than 150 keynote or invited lectures. He taught invited courses at more than 30 international summer schools.