Criteria for the identification of moves: the case of written offers

The paper discusses the communicative nature and typical characteristics of the act of offering, presented as partly directive and partly commissive. It also provides an extensive overview on the literature on offers. It then describes a set of offers produced in writing under controlled elicitation conditions. The analysis involves a classification of the component moves of offers, which comprises four explicit identification criteria -- content, wording, sequencing and function -- whose validity and suitability can thus be verified in further studies.