Having learnt German and English in addition to his Armenian, Georgian and Russian, Shaumyan took his degree in philology at Tbilisi State University.

At some time in the late 1930s he came across Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) and, captivated, knew his academic course was set.

He was a Party member and, with a post at Moscow State University, used his position to help, and sometimes to shelter, those who might be accused of the various crimes of formalism or idealism.

Shaumyan's later work is marked by a broad interest in the philosophy of science, in foundational questions of linguistics and in related but separate studies of consciousness theory, and neurolinguistics.

AUG is based on combinatorial logic and grammatical categories which are built from two primitive universal types, called a term (T) and a sentence (S), which exist in every language.