The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped.

Googling for literature on this sentence, I found this [1]:

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."

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.

[1] http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/04/the...