Narreme is the basic unit of narrative structure

Narrative structure

Narrative structure is generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer....

. According to Helmut Bonheim (2000), the concept of narreme was developed three decades ago by Eugene Dorfman and expanded by Henri Wittmann

Henri Wittmann

Henri Wittmann is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French.-Biography:Henri Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937...

, The narreme is to narratology

Narratology

Narratology denotes both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. While in principle the word may refer to any systematic study of narrative, in practice its usage is rather more restricted. It is an anglicisation of French...

 what the morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

 is to morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

 and the phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

 to phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

. The narreme, however, has yet to be persuasively defined in practice. In interpretative

Interpretative phenomenological analysis

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is an approach to psychological qualitative research with an idiographic focus, which means that it aims to offer insights into how a given person, in a given context, makes sense of a given phenomenon...

 narratology constrained in a framework of Principles and parameters

Principles and parameters

Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off...

, narration is the projection of a narreme N⁰, the abstract head of a narrative macrostructure where Nⁿ dominates immediately N^n-1 (Wittmann 1995).