Syntactic Structure
Each sentence in the story is an example of an increasingly deeply nested relative clause (humorous here, but normally a writing style that one should avoid). The last version, "This is the horse...", would be quite difficult to untangle if the previous ones were not present. See the Noun Phrase for more details about postmodification of the noun phrase in this manner.
Read more about this topic: This Is The House That Jack Built
Famous quotes containing the words syntactic and/or structure:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)