The single cycle model set forth in the recent minimalist program implies elimination of the LF cycle, thus phenomena originally handled within the LF component have now become a "touchstone" for evaluating the model. This paper claims that association with focus involving the focus particle dake 'only' in Japanese, which has been assumed to involve LF-movement, can be best captured solely within the overt component. More specifically, it proposes that the sentence with dake involves the following two overt derivational stages: (i) the stage where Merge establishes association between dake 'only' and its focus associate; (ii) the stage at which the scope of the constituent created by Merge in (i) is determined by overt movement. It further demonstrates not only that the proposed analysis provides a natural account for relevant syntactic properties of the phenomenon at hand, but also that in light of novel facts concerning idiom interpretations, LFmovement
operations assumed in previous studies do not in fact exist. To the extent that the present analysis is on the right track, it will provide further support for the basic tenet of the minimalist program that the computational system CHL is designed to carry out efficient computation in narrow syntax.