A system and method for syntactic re-ranking of possible transcriptions generated by automatic speech recognition are disclosed. A computer system accesses acoustic data for a recorded spoken language and generates a plurality of potential transcriptions for the acoustic data. The computer system scores the plurality of potential transcriptions to create an initial likelihood score for the plurality of potential transcriptions. For a particular potential transcription in the plurality of transcriptions, the computer system generates a syntactical likelihood score. The computer system creates an adjusted score for the particular potential transcription by combining the initial likelihood score and the syntactic likelihood score for the particular potential transcription.