- Since June 2016: Regular member of the Academia Europaea
- Since 2015 Regular member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz (Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur, Mainz)
- 2013 – 2018 Member of the Senate Committee on Collaborative Research Centres of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
- Since 2010 Advisory Editor of Trends in Linguistics, Mouton de Gruyter
- 2010 - 2013 Member of the Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize Committee of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS)
- 2013 – 2015 Member of the Senate Committee on Collaborative Research Centres of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
- 2009 - April 2014 Coordinator of the “Research Center of Social and Cultural Sciences in Mainz (SOCUM)” (Forschungszentrum Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften in Mainz)
- 2012/2013 Paris: Agence d’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (AERES), President of a visiting committee
- 2004 - 2011 Member of the Review Board for Linguistics of the German Research Foundation (DFG-Fachkollegium 104 “Sprachwissenschaften”)
- 2009 – 2011 Member of the Selection committee of the French-Germanresearch program for the Humanities and Social Sciences: German Research Foundation (DFG)/Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR).
- 2007 – 2010 Editor-in-Chief (Federführender Redaktor) of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
- 2006 - 2010 Management Committee of COST 31A (European Science Foundation): Stability and Adaptation of Classification Systems in a Cross-Cultural Perspective
- 1996 – 2010 Head of the Landesgraduiertenförderung at the University of Mainz (offers about 30 grants p.a. to excellent PhD students at the University of Mainz)
- 1996 – 2009 Editor-in-Chief of Trends in Linguistics (together with W. Winter and H. H. Hock)
- 2009 NCCR Selection Committee Social Sciences & Humanities of the Swiss National Foundation (Schweizerischer Nationalfonds, SNF)
- 2009 Paris: Agence d’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (AERES), President of a visiting committee.
- June 1999 - 2008 Coordinator of the Collaborative Research Center “Cultural and Linguistic Contacts”, funded by the German Research Foundation.
- 2008 Bonn: Mitglied der Expertenkommission zur Evaluation „Sprachen und Kulturen ausgewählter Epochen und Regionen“ an Universitäten in Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Member of advisory board
Since 2014
- School of Chinese Ethnic Minority languages and Literature (中国少数民族语言文学学院, http://scemll.muc.edu.cn/), Minzu University of China (中央民族大学)
Research Project on "Typological aspects of information structure of the minority languages in China".
Organizer/co-organizer of conferences, workshops, symposia (between 2009 – 2016)
- 2013, March 07 – 08: Robbeets, Martine & Bisang, Walter: International Symposium on “Paradigm Change in Historical Construction: the Transeurasian Languages and Beyond”, Mainz.
- 2014, November 21 – 22: Pommerening, Tanja & Bisang, Walter: Symposium “Von der Klassifizierung zum Konzept: Interdisziplinäre Heuristiken zur Konzeptualisierung von Flora, Fauna, Mensch und Landschaft / From classification to concepts: Interdisciplinary heuristics on the conceptualization of flora, fauna, man and landscape”.
DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 1876/ Graduate School 1876: “Frühe Konzepte von Mensch und Natur: Universalität, Spezifität, Tradierung / Early Concepts of Man and Nature: Universality, Specificity, Transmission”. - 2015, March 04 – 06: Workshop on “VO-OV: Correlations of Head-complement order in grammar and lexicon” at the German Linguistics Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) together with Gisbert Fanselow (Potsdam) and Hubert Haider (Salzburg).
- 2015, March 12 – 14: International symposium on “Grammaticalization. Areal patterns of grammaticalization and cross-linguistic variation in grammaticalization scenarios” at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Organizers: Andrej Malchukov and Walter Bisang.