A method will be described for synthesizing British English intonation patterns from an initial representation in terms of tonetic stress marks. The resultant synthesized patterns compare favorably with those of the resynthesized originals. The data comprises fluently spoken whole sentences of natural speech, rather than unrealistically short utterances produced under artificial conditions. The tonetic stress mark system used is a modification of those used by O'Connor and Arnold (1961) and Crystal (1969). It is being used for large‐scale prosodic transcription of a corpus of spoken English. Rules have been formulated for converting the tonetic stress marks to “target values” on a scale of one to ten, as in Pierrehumbert (1981). A declining topline and level baseline are then superimposed, yielding a frequency value for each syllable. The resultant F0 contour is compared with the original, for objective evaluation. The close match obtained suggests that tonetic stress marks are a valid starting point for intonation synthesis from annotated text. Since these units also carry functional weight, they may well be more satisfactory than an abstract tonal representation, for the purposes of speech synthesis from text.