“To call” or “To receive a call”

Question

Consider these example sentences taken from SPACEALC:

[a] （人に）電話をかける。 "put in a call to ~"

[b] ~が（主語に）電話をかける。 "receive a telephone call from"

My observations: Both sentences use かける. Transitivity is unchanged, there is no use of られる construction to indicate passive sentence structure. Yet one is "to call" and one is "to receive the call". So [a] and [b] do not seem to be consistent.

In an attempt to resolve the inconsistency, I looked for other examples. Consider other sentence also from SPACEALC:

[c] （～から）電話がかかってくる。 "get called (主語に)"

[c] leads me to conclude that かかる is the intransitive counterpart to かける, and sentence [b] should be wrong.

(Question) How do I express "calling" and "receiving a call"? Is the passive form of かける used at all?(I.e. かけられる)? Or is the passive of かかる used at all?

(Question) Can I call the person performing the calling 電話をかける人　and the person who is receiving the call 電話がかかる人 ?

Answer 1

You are confused by the translation. (I didn't realize the translation can be so confusing in the site.)

[a] （人に）電話をかける。 "put in a call to ~"

Here "~" is 人

[b] ~が（主語に）電話をかける。 "receive a telephone call from"

Here the part before に is the subject(主語) of the translation. So "~" is the part after "from" : "主語 receive a telephone call from ~"

So you can see, "AがBに電話をかける" means "A calls B". You can translate it as "B receives a call from A".

I don't think 電話がかかる人 is correct (電話をかける人 is OK, though). You can say 電話を受ける人 to refer to the one received the call.

Answer 2

If you are okay with WWWJDIC as a credible source:

• 電話がかかる is "to get a phone call"

• 電話をかける is "to make a phone call"

As for the second question, I see nothing wrong with 電話をかける and 電話がかかる modifying 人. It's grammatical, at least. There is novel/movie titled "時をかける少女" after all :P