Language-world relationship within the context of John Locke's conception of language

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke aims to inquire into the origin, certainty and extent of human knowledge. For this reason, he investigates human understanding. Before constructing a theory of knowledge, after composing the theory of ideas, Locke realizes that he has to scrutinize the nature, use and signification of language since knowledge consists of linguistic propositions. By this way, he puts forth a theory of language. According to this theory, words and things are related through the ideas which are the objects of understanding. In other words, the relationship between the language and the world is built via the mediation of the ideas. Moreover, representation, communication and nominalism are three dimensions by which this relationship can be examined. In this work, firstly, Locke's theory of ideas, theory of language and theory of knowledge were held respectively. Then, these three dimensions were tried to be explained.