Little Fish Eats the Big Fish

Emphasis J.D.'s:

Even though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics.
–pg. 51

I've had the same thought and, if frustration is indeed what J.D.'s italics is expressing here, felt the same frustration. When I first heard about semiotics I thought, "Oh cool, here's a superset of linguistics that will tell me how language fits into the larger scheme of communication." But in practice it seems to be more the other way around–that semiotics involves applying linguistic metaphors to non-linguistic things. ("It's like film has a grammar, see?...") This isn't particularly illuminating for someone already versed in linguistic metaphors, and also gets more and more strained the further the non-linguistic things get from natural language.