The present research aims at a partial model for synthesized text intonation, restricted to utterances consisting of a single intonation phrase. Intonational characteristics of short utterances, embedded in systematically varied positions of a paragraph were investigated. The effects of paragraph position on sentence prosody were mainly located in the beginning of the utterance. A model was formulated capturing the main findings and it was perceptually evaluated within the framework of a system for text-to-speech synthesis. The results indicated that the model contributed to the naturalness of the synthesized intonation.