Question

The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt.

meaning

Answer 1

Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take "the rat ate the malt" and stick in more information to make "the rat the cat killed ate the malt."  But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.

Answer 2

The rat ate the malt, the cat killed the rat, the dog chased the rat