  The Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) lower bound on the maximum cardinality of a q-ary
code of length n with minimum Hamming distance at least d can be obtained by
application of Turan's theorem to the graph with vertex set {0,1,..,q-1}^n in
which two vertices are joined if and only if their Hamming distance is at least
d. We generalize the GV bound by applying Turan's theorem to the graph with
vertex set C^n, where C is a q-ary code of length m and two vertices are joined
if and only if their Hamming distance at least d. We asymptotically evaluate
the resulting bound for n-> \infty and d \delta mn for fixed \delta > 0, and
derive conditions on the distance distribution of C that are necessary and
sufficient for the asymptotic generalized bound to beat the asymptotic GV
bound. By invoking the Delsarte inequalities, we conclude that no improvement
on the asymptotic GV bound is obtained. By using a sharpening of Turan's
theorem due to Caro and Wei, we improve on our bound. It is undecided if there
exists a code C for which the improved bound can beat the asymptotic GV bound.
