R doesn't have a concept of increment operator (as for example ++ in C). However, it is not difficult to implement one yourself, for example:
inc <- function(x)
{
eval.parent(substitute(x <- x + 1))
}
In that case you would call
x <- 10
inc(x)
However, it introduces function call overhead, so it's slower than typing x <- x + 1 yourself. If I'm not mistaken increment operator was introduced to make job for compiler easier, as it could convert the code to those machine language instructions directly.