这是语言学界一个著名的笑话。

这个疑问句，如果改写为陈述句，是这样的：

You brought [that book [that I don't want [to be read out of to (me)]]] up for ___ (what 空位).

read out of sth 表示大声朗诵，bring sth up 就是把东西拿上来（注意前文中的 go upstairs），for sth 是目的状语，转换成疑问句时把 for sth 中的 sth 去掉，变成 what 放在句子开头，就成了这个笑话。

小孩的话的意思是：你为什么拿上来一本我不希望你读给我听的书？

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这个笑话讲烂了。来听一个新颖的笑话。美国哲学家Douglas Hofstadter在Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid中写过这样一句话：

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.

试分析这句话的句法结构。

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这种在一个简单的句子中间插入无数的成分，使句子变得复杂的过程，文学上谓之“圆周句”（Periodic Sentence）。读这样的句子就像下矿井，句子的开头相当于地表，从主句到从句相当于下降，而从从句回到主句相当于上升。这种句子读到末尾的时候人们会有一种恍然大悟、大气长舒的感觉——因为终于回到“地表”了。

（据Wikipedia）Nikolai Gogol的小说The Overcoat中写过一个高度夸张的圆周句，可尝试分析之：

Even at those hours when the gray Petersburg sky is completely overcast and the whole population of clerks have dined and eaten their fill, each as best he can, according to the salary he receives and his personal tastes; when they are all resting after the scratching of pens and bustle of the office, their own necessary work and other people's, and all the tasks that an overzealous man voluntarily sets himself even beyond what is necessary; when the clerks are hastening to devote what is left of their time to pleasure; some more enterprising are flying to the theater, others to the street to spend their leisure staring at women's hats, some to spend the evening paying compliments to some attractive girl, the star of a little official circle, while some—and this is the most frequent of all—go simply to a fellow clerk's apartment on the third or fourth story, two little rooms with a hall or a kitchen, with some pretensions to style, with a lamp or some such article that has cost many sacrifices of dinners and excursions—at the time when all the clerks are scattered about the apartments of their friends, playing a stormy game of whist, sipping tea out of glasses, eating cheap biscuits, sucking in smoke from long pipes, telling, as the cards are dealt, some scandal that has floated down from higher circles, a pleasure which the Russian do never by any possibility deny himself, or, when there is nothing better to talk about, repeating the everlasting anecdote of the commanding officer who was told that the tail had been cut off the horse on the Falconet monument—in short, even when everyone, was eagerly seeking entertainment, Akaky Akakievich did not indulge in any amusement.