In contact linguistics, studies on borrowability have tended to focus on morphemes, lexemes, and syntactic structures, while the level of phraseology has not received similar focus, even though the calque of phraseological units represents a wide-spread type of borrowing. Phraseology is an area that shows the deep influence of English on many world languages, including Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The present study aims to find out whether there are common syntactic, semantic, or cultural features that characterise calqued phraseological units and determine their selection as members of the MSA phraseological reservoir. Based on a parallel corpus of MSA phraseological units calqued on English expressions, the study investigates the source units syntactically to find which patterns tend to be borrowed more frequently than others, and analyses them semantically to determine to what extent transparency and decomposability can affect the borrowability of phraseological units. While the findings indicate that there are syntactic and semantic factors that considerably affect phraseological borrowability, the study shows that cultural considerations also play a significant role in the acceptance or rejection of certain expressions by members of the speech community.