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In this article, a new approach was established to estimate the fractional contributions of soil dust, biomass burning, biogenic emissions, coal burning, and vehicle exhaust to the carbonaceous particulate matter by carbon isotope and linear regression tech-niques of OC-K+ (organic carbon) and OC-EC (elemental carbon). Using the method described herein, the fractional distributions of these sources were quantitatively determined for the OC and semi-quantitatively for the EC in the size-resolved particles (size ranges: <0.49,0.49-0.95,0.95-1.5,1.5-3.0,3.0-7.2, and >7.2 /im) collected in Jiading District, a suburb of Shanghai, China. Distinct size dis-tribution of contributions of these sources to the OC and EC was observed. Generally, biomass burning contributed a large fraction to OC in the smaller particles and biogenic emissions shared a bigger fraction to OC in the larger particles. Soil dust made con-tributions solely to the OC, for no EC fraction was found in the soil dust. OC from coal burning concentrated in the fine particles (smaller than 3.0 /im), and that from vehicle exhaust exhibited bimodal distribution, with peaks for both fine and coarse parti-cles. The fossil sources dominated EC in almost all the size ranges. Though a few deviations are brought about in the calculation, this approach provides an effective way to distinguish the sources of the carbonaceous particulate matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]