In certain responsive contexts, English allows normally prosodically-weak syllables to exceptionally bear focus marking: apparentLY, mayBE, looks LIKE, etc. As this phenomenon is under-described in the literature, this paper first describes its distributional, phonological, and semantic properties. It is then proposed that this striking prosodic contour arises derivationally, based on how PF and LF normally (and independently of one another) interpret syntactic F-marking. More specifically, the prosody and meaning of these expressions derive from a syntactic structure in which the F-marked element (a degree operator modifying a speech act phrase) happens not to map to any segmental content at PF. The paper concludes with an outlook for this and other phenomena with stray focus marking.