This study investigates the use of dake ‘just, only’, which is the "post-clitic" of the predicate, as can be seen in such a Japanese sentence as watashi wa shigoto o suru dakeda, meaning ‘All I do is just work’, ‘I only work’, and elucidates various types of context the word dake ‘just, only’ is used. Dake expresses ‘limitation’. In other words, it is a word that expresses ‘self-affirmation’ and ‘denial of others’. However, dake which limits a sentence often conveys the ‘denial of others’ more strongly over the ‘self-affirmation’. In that situation, the ‘denial of others’ is explicitly indicated in the context and dakeda ‘it is just that’ is used with such a premise. As such, the self-affirmation dakeda serves as the background to let the ‘denial of others’ to stand out, thereby performs the explanatory function that authenticates the denial ofself and others. Moreover, other examples were observed, in which both self-affirmation and the denial of others had the same weight, as well as those in which the focus was placed on self-affirmation. We were able to confirm that all of these three types of situations share the similarity that the premise was clearly given in the context, and that dakeda did not exist as an independent clause, but did exist only when there was the cause that served as the premise.