In recent decades, significant work in discourse analysis and conversation analysis has gone into understanding personal moments of talk-in-interaction as ongoing responses to the contingencies of the present moment. This understanding has been reached with the help of an analytical process that has foresworn attention to the subjective histories of persons. I believe that such an understanding is incomplete and in this presentation I provide arguments and evidence that treating present interaction as fundamentally different from past practice is a dichotomy that must be overcome.

Failing to recognize that the past is connected to the present and that personal histories provide context for interaction in the present moment obscures much of our understanding of present actions. Though personal histories are rarely considered in the analysis of talk-in-interaction, they are nonetheless the source of enduring dispositions to feel, think, and behave.