Gödel, Escher, Bach has a great paragraph on this in the context of recursive structures and processes (i.e. things that can be modeled with stacks, i.e. push a

Gödel, Escher, Bach has a great paragraph on this in the context of recursive structures and processes (i.e. things that can be modeled with stacks, i.e. push and pop operations): Recursion in Language (p. 138): Our mental stacking power is perhaps slightly stronger in language. The grammatical structure of all languages involves setting up quite elaborate push-down stacks, though, to be sure, the difficulty of understanding a sentence increases sharply with the number of pushes onto the stack. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which Droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience out-of-order popping from the stack onto which the professor's verbs been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender. But in normal ken German, such deep stacks almost never occur-in fact, native speaker of German often unconsciously violate certain conventions which force verb to go to the end, in order to avoid the mental effort of keeping track of the stack. Every language has constructions which involve stacks, though usually of a less spectacular nature than German. But there are always of rephrasing sentences so that the depth of stacking is minimal. Here is an example of such a (grammatical) beast: Der Mechaniker, auf den wir wegen dem Unfall, den wir, bevor wir die Stadt, die im Norden liegt, erreichen konnten, hatten, gewartet haben, ist endlich angekommen. This can’t really be translated to English: The mechanist, for whom because of the accident, which, before the city, which lies in the North, we could reach, we had, we have waited for, has finally arrived.