(Others didn't come; assertion>only) Just like English only, the dake sentence involves a focus structure and gives rise to two entailments, 'John came' and 'Other alternative individuals didn't come'.
dake generates a set of alternatives in the sense of Rooth (1985Rooth ( , 1995 and expresses that the alternative propositions are false (see also Horn, 1969): 14John-dake-ga kita = 1 iff a. John came; and where C is a contextually given set of propositions and C is the subset of the Rooth's (1992) focus value of "[John] F came", i.e., C ∈ In other words, the exhaustification by dake happens at the level of the propositional content.