Since the aim of this paper is to give an explicit account of syntactic and semantic aspects of FPs and association with focus phenomenon in Japanese, it would be convenient for our present purposes to call what the FP semantically associates with the focused phrase.
focus is defined here entirely in terms of semantics, the realization of which in the phonological domain is assumed to be at most optional.3 One major difference between a Japanese FP and an English one is that the former sometimes allows association with phrases larger than the one it attaches to, while the latter never allows it.