Achievements have been made on Nonpersonal Subject Sentences (NSS), an important issue in linguistic studies concerning animacy, but there exist three problems: overgeneralization because of improper classification, chaos due to the confusing denotation and misjudgments resulted from vague concepts. Three countermeasures are put forward: 1) to classify NSS scientifically to avoid overgeneralization by proposing that NSS results from syntactic and metaphorical devices and the latter include anthropomorphic sentences and dead metaphor with no rhetorical effects; 2) to define the denotation to remove chaos by naming the syntactic type as Nonpersonal Action Sentence (NAS) and distinguishing it from metaphorical types by analyzing its function of “transferring responsibility” to improve its practical effect; 3) to clarify the concepts without misjudgments by declaring that there are many NSS in Chinese and that only the rhetorical effects of NAS in English cannot be retained in Chinese. The research is conducive to solving the long-lasting overlapping problem between syntactic and metaphorical devices with better effects.