<i>The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped.</i><p>Googling for literature on this sentence, I found this [1]:<p><i>Chomsky (1965) expands on this point when he makes a distinction between the acceptability and grammaticalness of sentences like "the man who the boy who the students recognized pointed out is a friend of mine". He writes: "The notion of "acceptable" is not to be confused with "grammatical." Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence."</i><p>This reminds me of code succinctness vs readability. The difference is bad readability in programming is acceptable because code's first purpose is to communicate to a machine.<p>[1] <a href="http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/04/the_embedding_b.html" rel="nofollow">http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/04/the...</a>