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The One’s Way Construction, like “He made his way to the station,” is unique in that a wide variety of verbs (including denominal verbs used as nonce words) can be employed. This productivity has attracted the attention of many researchers, but Kirchner (1951) and Omuro (2000a, 2000b) are almost the only articles that address the issue of the “self-conscious” use of this construction; Kirchner claims that the construction is sometimes used “self-consicously” in order to enhance the humorous or descriptive flavor of the style. The present study is based on the corpus-based survey of newspaper headlines and provides further evidence to prove that Kirchner’s claim is correct. In Section 2, we provide examples of “self-conscious” use of rhetorical devices (alliteration, oxymorons and so forth) in newspaper headlines. In Section 3, some verbs are identified as peculiar to the One’s Way Construction, based on the frequency and Mutual Information Score (Mi-score). Section 4 is devoted to examining all the examples of the One’s Way Construction found in newspaper headlines in the Bank of English corpus. All this leads us to conclude that the One’s Way Construction can indeed be used self-consciously.
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