Abstract

The rapport between a speaker and an audience has a degree of influence over the interpretation of the message. Healthy rapport can transform a nominal message into a more palatable enterprise, while unhealthy rapport can cause a strained interpretation of an otherwise excellent message. ;Such a premise adds hermeneutcial significance, as well as a technical aspect, to the term rapport. Rapport, however, has been inadvertently uncultivated as a hermeneutical force due to its wide array of meanings and the fact that it is a rather subjective topic to grasp. Nonetheless, the evidence of rapport can be found by bringing the field of hermeneutics together with those of rhetoric, ethics, psychology and philosophy. ;A merging of hermeneutics with rhetoric allows the development of a working definition for rapport, in a technical sense, and further grounds it as communicative action. If rapport is a hermeneutical device used inherently in the communication process, then it must maintain ethical parameters. These ethical parameters do not sufficiently limit rapport as a concept, rather they provide distinctives operating to set it apart from other accepted hermeneutical approaches. Such approaches have traditionally focused primarily on one of the three points of the communication triangle , to the disparagement of the other two points. The addition of rapport to the hermeneutical process brings balance to these approaches by extending a harmonious relationship throughout all of the points of the communication triangle. The 'balance of power' retains ethical implications for the concept of rapport. ;That rapport is a distinct interpretive concept implies that it has a tendency toward a hermeneutical end. Such a tendency is disposed through the very medium of language itself, although this same tendency maintains an ontological basis that finds its psychological expression in the tension between the alienated self and the self as identified. Beyond any plausible demonstration of rapport operating as a hermeneutical device, the concept remains for widespread utilization