But English speakers make games and songs out of this practice.
>> There's a fleck on the speck on the tail
on the frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.
Which is a proper grammatical sentence. The key to the song is building it up. The song starts with: "There's a hole in the bottom of the sea", and the song builds the sentence up. Indeed: having a grossly complicated sentence is the "Fun" of the song, but that doesn't change the fact that its grammatically correct (and actually understood by the listener / singers).
The examples in GP deepen and pop the stack before the sentence is over. Your example only deepens the stack-- it's like tail recursion vs non-tail recursion. I think that's what makes it a special case of deeply nested grammatical structure that's easy to understand.
There are no weird sequences of words "hated liked chased" that require backtracking to parse.
Exactly, "a fleck on the speck on the tail on the frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea" only has stack depth 1 as long as you can do a kind of tail call optimization (aka left-corner parsing with an arc-eager transition, see https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C92-1032.pdf)
>> There's a fleck on the speck on the tail on the frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.
Which is a proper grammatical sentence. The key to the song is building it up. The song starts with: "There's a hole in the bottom of the sea", and the song builds the sentence up. Indeed: having a grossly complicated sentence is the "Fun" of the song, but that doesn't change the fact that its grammatically correct (and actually understood by the listener / singers).