Abstract: | For any locally compact group , let and be the Fourier and the Fourier-Stieltjes algebras of , respectively. is decomposed as a direct sum of and , where is a subspace of consisting of all elements that satisfy the property: for any and any compact subset , there is an with and such that is characterized by the following: an element is in if and only if, for any there is a compact subset such that for all with and . Note that we do not assume the amenability of . Consequently, we have for all if is noncompact. We will apply this characterization of to investigate the general properties of and we will see that is not a subalgebra of even for abelian locally compact groups. If is an amenable locally compact group, then is the subspace of consisting of all elements with the property that for any compact subset , . |