Learn English – Difference between too much/very much

adverbsphrase-choice

On seeing the lion she felt much/too much/very much afraid.

Which one of the three suits in the sentence as the best? How does they differ from one another?

Best Answer

Of the three options in the question, only one is correct: "very much".

One could say "very afraid", but not "much afraid".

"Too much" has a very strong connotation of excess. One could be "too afraid to do (some action)", but I cannot think of a way to correctly and comfortably use "too much afraid". I think it could be done, but the essential meaning would be that the subject of the sentence had so much fear that they were unable to perform some action. "Too much" is distinctly taken to mean that there is an excess.

I will use the American Heritage dictionary as reference for "very" today. You will note that the first definition is "In a high degree; extremely". It works quite well for us here. And, the definition of "much" serves to reinforce and validate the very. It adds emphasis.

And, at this point, regarding the usage of "much" applied to "afraid", a simple internet search comes to my rescue. Searching on "grammar rules for much and many" gets me a few good pages. I like this one: Much - Many - A lot of - Few - English Grammar.

That should be helpful. Just to add an example of using much with afraid, based on the negative / positive sentence rule we find on that page:

  1. "She was not much afraid." (Acceptable)
  2. Whereas, "She was much afraid." is entirely incorrect, because the sentence is not negative.
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