  We outline, on a few instructive examples, the characteristic features of the
approach to superbranes and super Born-Infeld theories based on the concept of
partial spontaneous breaking of global supersymmetry (PBGS). The examples
include the N=1, D=4 supermembrane and the ``space-filling'' D2- and D3-branes.
Besides giving a short account of the available results for these systems, we
present some new developments. For the supermembrane we prove the equivalence
of the equation of motion following from the off-shell Goldstone superfield
action and the one derived directly from the nonlinear realizations formalism.
We give a new derivation of the off-shell Goldstone superfield actions for the
considered systems, using a universal procedure inspired by the relationship
between linear and nonlinear realizations of PBGS.
