"Move along now," said a sharp voice. "The Sorting Ceremony's about to
start."
. . . . . .Harry quickly looked down again as Professor McGonagall silently
placed a four-legged stool in front of the first years. On top of the
stool she put a pointed wizard's hat. This hat was patched and frayed
and extremely dirty. Aunt Petunia wouldn't have let it in the
house.
Maybe they had to try and get a rabbit out of it,
Harry thought wildly, that seemed the sort of thing – noticing
that everyone in the hall was now staring at the hat, he stared at it,
too.
(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)
I’m confused about whether ‘that’ is a relative pronoun or a demonstrative pronoun. The former doesn’t seem to make sense, so I think it’s the latter. If it’s a demonstrative pronoun, (1) is its referent the italicized sentence? And, (2) as a result, does ‘the sort of thing’ naturally refer to the ‘the Sorting Ceremony’?
Best Answer
The that in this sentence is a demonstrative pronoun that refers to Trying to get a rabbit out of the hat. Magicians are always pulling rabbits out of hats. He doesn't know anything about the sorting ceremony. Had he understood why the hat was there, he wouldn't have had that wild thought about pulling a rabbit out of the hat. In addition, the punctuation is not formally correct (I don't know whether this is because it's the way JK Rowling wrote it or the way you copied it: I think there ought to be a period after "wildly". If, indeed, the words in bold are Harry's thoughts, as the 12 words before "Harry thought wildly" are, then they ought to be in italics. Still, it wouldn't matter:
is a comma-spliced sentence that can't be used in formal writing, only in novels. To be formally correct, and to make the pronoun function as a relative rather than as a demonstrative pronoun in this sentence, that has to be replaced by which.