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What do we call adjectives formed from verbs? For example:
What is the technical term for such adjectives? Do they have a name at all?
The word you're looking for is participle. Wikipedia has a good summary, including the following discussion of English participles:
English verbs have two participles:
called variously the present, active, imperfect, or progressive participle, it is identical in form to the gerund; the term present participle is sometimes used to include the gerund. The term gerund-participle is also used.
called variously the past, passive, or perfect participle, it is usually identical to the verb's preterite (past tense) form, though in irregular verbs the two usually differ.
Your examples are all of the past participle. The present participle is formed with -ing.
It's a modifier, which is a word that is used attributively to restrict or add sense to the noun that follows it.
For example, the past participle in the following phrases is used as modifier for the noun that follows it.
The other term is, how I have already said in the previous sentence, past participle.
If you use the past participle of the word as an adjective it is a reduction of passive usage.
Normally the bed which you did not make or the bed which wasn't made is the unmade bed. According to the situation you can use it before or after a noun:
I found all letters unwritten
vs.
I found all unwritten letters
For the adjective nothing changes, but there are exceptions here. Most of them can be used with or without a noun, but for some you should change it:
The man was drunk.
vs.
The drunken man fell down.
And:
The ship was sunk.
vs.
The sunken ship was very big
You can find further explanations on the Internet...
The Latin word for the verbal adjective is GERUND. That word is used less and less in modern English classes.
"I found all letters unwritten" vs. "I found all unwritten letters".
I just want to mention two things here. First, an unwritten letter is a blank sheet of paper; unless you mean letter as in "G", in which case it's called a space. Second, these two sentences are not necessarily synonymous. Active and impassive sentences should mean exactly the same or be equivalent in connotation.
This is an example of Active vs. Impassive:
The difference being that the subject that did the action is converted to an indirect object rather than performing the action.
