The background to this question is a conversation with some people I know. One of which is a native American (southern U.S.), myself (native Swedish, fluent in English) and other various languages represented. The conversation made me realise that, in English, the sentence "I love you much" sounds weird (we all agreed), whereas "I love you very much" sounds perfectly fine.
Now, I'm not a linguist by any means, but to my knowledge the word 'much' in this case, is an adverb - as it modifies the verb to love. I don't know if 'very' is an adjective, or if there's a separate word class for words that modify other adverbs (or adjectives for that matter). I've been racking my brain trying to find another case where an adverb (much) can only be used in conjunction with another word (very), and can't find any. Is this merely a case of informal use, or am I missing some grammar rule I should've learned in school?
I put this under the grammar tag, since my example sentence is of less importance than the actual question of the grammar around it. I'm happy to be proven wrong or simply learn more, so don't hesitate to just throw it out there if I'm totally off track! Thanks in advance!