The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) started a new approach to viewing metaphors in languages. Traditionally, metaphor is considered as one of the rhetorical devices. Conceptual metaphor, however, is an approach for us to understand abstract notions in terms of relatively concrete concepts. The HEART metaphor in Chinese plays an essential role in forming and motivating related collocations. Previous studies of conceptual metaphors of HEART in Chinese are based on the data from dictionary entries. There is a lack of corpus-based studies on the HEART metaphors at the collocation level in both L1 and L2 Chinese, presenting the authentic usage of HEART metaphorical collocations in the native speakers' and language learners' daily language. To fill this gap, this dissertation examines the HEART metaphorical collocations in Chinese native speakers' corpus, L2 Chinese corpus, and American English corpus. The main results include: 1) The Chinese HEART is the locus of a wide range of emotions and other types of body feelings, whereas the English HEART metaphors do not show the same feature; 2) Most of the Chinese HEART collocations are not highly lexicalized idioms, while most of the English HEART collocations are lexicalized phrases; 3) The Chinese HEART collocations that are motivated by the metonymy THE HEART AS A PERSON is also associated with a wide range of human behaviors like thinking and complaining, but the study does not find the English HEART collocations relate to human behaviors by the native speakers of American English; 4) L2 Chinese learners show a very different pattern in terms of HEART collocations in Chinese. Collocations motivated by the HEART metaphors are significantly underused compared with L1 Chinese. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]