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I don’t understand what is happening to the following sentence, especially “ that sizzled for a split second”

I read this on Kimutatu Tokyo university English reading (キムタツ東大英語リーディング), an English textbook written in Japanese for college entrance exams.

The sentence is underlined in the picture.
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“At this, the man coughed and walked over to a can of water, throwing something into that sizzled for a split second.”

I think that “throwing” is a participial and “that” means “a can of water”. Then what the subject of the “sizzled?” I know the cigarette made the noise. But I have no grammatical idea about the subject of “sizzled”

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    There is an error in the sentence. A possible correction is: " ... throwing something into it that sizzled ... ".
    – Peter
    Commented Jan 5 at 2:00
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    I agree with the last comment. It makes no sense. The preposition should be "in", not "into". The subject of "sizzled" would then be "something". Another possibility is that the word "it" is missing: "... throwing something into it that sizzled for a split second". This version would also have "something" as subject of "sizzled".
    – BillJ
    Commented Jan 5 at 8:35
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    Beware that 'textbook'.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Jan 5 at 9:02
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    I'm not sure that it's 100% an error but it's certainly non-standard. The noun following a preposition can sometimes be omitted in casual speech (and in some dialects people will form what might be non-standard phrasal verbs that way e.g. "Can you come into?" meaning "Can you come inside/into the building?"), but this text appears to be more formal.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Jan 5 at 10:32
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    – RIN
    Commented Jan 7 at 1:17

2 Answers 2

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I think it should be in instead of into:

At this, the man coughed and walked over to a can of water, throwing something into that sizzled for a split second.

Or it could be missing it:

At this, the man coughed and walked over to a can of water, throwing something into it that sizzled for a split second.

In both cases, something is what sizzled.

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    Since it's from a test and is underlined, I wonder whether this sentence is the subject of some question like "Where is the error in this sentence?"
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Jan 5 at 22:04
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    Yes, from the previous Q&A, the underlinded section has to be translated to Japanese for the test.
    – James K
    Commented Jan 6 at 0:22
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As already noted, the word "into" is a mistake. You should therefore be cautious about using this book for learning English.

The fix is to use "in" to form a verb phrase "throwing {something} in" or to use a pronoun "it": "throwing {something} into it".

The word "that" is a marker of the relative clause. You could slightly rephrase as :

... throwing {something that sizzled for a split second} in.

Here you can see that the subject of sizzled is understood to be "something". The relative clause has been moved to the end, after in, because it is a long phrase, and long phrases are often moved to the end of clauses, when grammatically possible.

The word "that" isn't a pronoun, and so doesn't mean "can of water".

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