In this article a prosodic model for European Portuguese (henceforth EP) based on a linguistic approach is described. It was developed in the scope of the Antigona Project, an electronic-commerce system using a speech interface (Speech to Text plus Text To Speech, the latter based on a time concatenation technique) for EP language. The purpose of our work is to contribute with practical strategies in order to improve synthetic speech quality and naturalness, concerning prosodic processing. It is also our goal to show that syntactic structures strongly determine prosody patterns in EP. It is also important to emphasize the pragmatic commercial objective of this system, which is selling a product. Therefore, this type of application deals with a specific vocabulary choice, it is displayed in predictable syntactic constructions and sentences, making prosodic contours and focus become expected. This study was held in intimate articulation between the engineering experience and tools and the linguistic approach. We believe that this work represents an important achievement for future research on synthetic speech processing in particular for EP. Moreover, it can be applied to other Romanic languages, regarding their syntactic resemblances
