Logical Stress

a means of emphasizing a meaningful unit of an utterance. Superimposed on the obligatory word stress, logical stress usually intensifies the phonetic features of a word, emphasizing information that is new or disputable for one of the interlocutors. For example, in the phrase “Your sister came” logical stress may emphasize any one of the three words. The same may be achieved graphically (italics, etc.), lexically (“none other than,” “just now”), or syntactically (by word order and emphatic constructions). Logical stress is one of the methods of actual division of a sentence.