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We use a few instructive examples to outline 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. In addition to a short account of the available results for these systems, we present some new developments. For the supermembrane, we prove that the equation of motion following from the off-shell Goldstone superfield action is equivalent to the one derived directly from the nonlinear-realization formalism. We use a universal procedure inspired by the relation between linear and nonlinear realizations of the PBGS to obtain a new derivation of the off-shell Goldstone superfield actions for these systems.