The study aims to identify variability in the forms of expressing the grammatical basis and the features of the connection between the principal parts in the sentence as a factor of connotation at the syntactic level of the Russian language. The article examines various means and ways of presenting the main meaning of an utterance, taking into account additional emotional-expressive, evaluative, and stylistic nuances of the utterance. The work analyzes the forms of the predicate, including those expressed by verbal phraseological units, as a means of connotation, and the fluctuations in the coordination of the subject with the predicate. Special cases of reduction and expansion of the grammatical basis as indicators of the connotative nuances of an utterance are noted. Syntactic connotation is substantiated in the aspect of subjective modality types of the sentence. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it substantiates the status of syntactic connotation for the first time and specifies the connotative meanings of an utterance depending on the grammatical resources of the sentence. As a result, it has been found that sentences with non-specialized forms of the predicate and with formally unexpressed predicative connection of the principal parts are most prone to connotative complexity.