In Defence of Lydgate: Lydgate’s Use of Binomials in his Troy Book (Part 1)

Section 1 provides a very brief introduction to Lydgate, who was probably the most prolific English poet. He was also fond of rhetoric and frequently employed binomials. A short definition of binomials is given in section 2. Section 3 looks at the relation of binomials and multinomials, section 4 at the density and function of binomials, section 5 at previous research, and section 6 sketches formal features of binomials (especially structure, word-classes, alliteration). Section 7 discusses the etymological structure of binomials (native word + native word, loan-word + loan-word, native word + loan-word, loan-word + native word), and the so-called translation theory. Section 8 deals with the semantic structure of binomials, i.e. the semantic relation between the two words that make up a binomial. The main relations are synonymy, antonymy, and complementarity – the latter has many subgroups.